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More "Speck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ridiculously like her in feature, but he was half a head taller. He walked with quick, short steps, and had a very flat back and square shoulders. His appearance, even allowing for the high seriousness of an outfitter's point of view, was eminently satisfactory. There was no fleck or speck of fluff or dust or mud about his clothes. He was, Eloquent decided grimly, a "knut" of the nuttiest flavour; from the top of his exceedingly smooth head to his admirable grey spats and well-shaped boots, a thoroughly well-dressed ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... slept the first night in the cavern Enoch had noted. Harden never even saw the cavern but had spent the night crawling steadily toward the rim. At dawn, Forrester had made his way to the top of the butte by the same route Enoch had followed, and had seen Harden, a black speck moving laboriously on the southern horizon. He had not recognized him, and set out to overtake him. It was not until noon that he had done so. Even after he realized whom he was pursuing, he had not given up, for by that time he was rueing bitterly ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... this speck of a room, and purified it. He had literally compelled Sam to help him. That compelling was almost a modern miracle, and wrought by radiant smiles, and a firm grip on Sam's shoulder when he told ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... were of a smooth neutral tinted plaster; where they met the floor the corners were all carefully rounded off so that no dust could gather in cracks and crevices; the floor, too, was of smooth cement; there was no spot in which a speck of dust could settle in improper peace. A series of benches ran round the room, and gave harbourings to a collection of scientific instruments of strange appearance and shape; two large tables, one at either end of the room, were similarly equipped. And at a desk placed between them, and just ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... There's a little speck of cloud in the blue of my joy right now, though. I'm afraid I've blundered already. Miss Lee—Virginia, I mean—said as she turned to leave my room that they have dinner at six and I'd have plenty of time ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... Turk. "Wilt thou be beaten then, and by an Israelite? Shall this lovely maid be given to a perverter of the Scriptures, to an inheritor of the fire, to one of a race that would not bestow on their fellow-men so much as the speck out of a date-stone? It were a shame upon ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... schoolboy's mouth water, but sadly impeded the dogs. Nearing the ocean the Kolyma widens by several miles, and here we made our first acquaintance with the ice-hummocks or "torosses" formed by the breakers of the Polar Sea. Towards sunset a black speck was sighted on the snowy waste, and two hours later we reached Sukharno, the Tsar's remotest outpost on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, about eight thousand miles from Petersburg. Here there was a single hut, so low in stature and buried ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... reading in one of those historical novels once about a chap—a buck he would have been, no doubt, or a macaroni or some such bird as that—who, when people said the wrong thing, merely laughed down from lazy eyelids and flicked a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at his wrists. This was practically what I did now. At least, I straightened my tie and smiled one of those inscrutable smiles of mine. I then withdrew and went out for ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... steering for the harbour where the "Lady Alice" lay, she kept round the island to another on the other side. What she was, or why she had come to the island, I could not conjecture, I was about to return when I caught sight of a speck of white canvas above the horizon. "That probably is the 'Eagle,'" I thought. "In a few days I shall have to bid my kind friends farewell and go back to ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... black speck; it's papa! Oh, I love him, Irving. Good-by, my darlings! Good-by! They didn't want to go except for ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... first fronted me, and I was moved, and forgot my promise to Kadrab, and gave him the money. Then was Kadrab wroth, and kicked the old beggar with his fore-foot, lifting him high in air, and lo! he did not alight, but rose over the roofs of the houses and beyond the city, till he was but a speck in the blue of the sky above. So Kadrab bit his forefinger amazed, and glanced at his foot, and at what was visible of the old beggarman, and again at his foot, thinking but of what he had done with it, and the might manifested in that kick, fool that he was! All the way homeward he kept scanning ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... having heard of the attack of the savages and the destruction they had caused, made his way to the scene of the ruins. He could find no trace of the Godfreys and was returning by the border of the lake to his log cabin, when he saw the sloop far in the distance like a speck on the frozen surface of the lake. He hastened out to where she lay. To his surprise and joy he found out, when nearing the little craft, signs of life on board. Sparks were issuing from the cabin. Very soon he was on board. He was met at the companion-way by ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... through the winter weather, Behind the shutters by a light's faint speck, Poring o'er books, their faces close together, The lame girl's arm around her mother's neck. They dressed their windows not one time but twenty, Each change more pinched, more desperately neat; Alas! ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... dark heavens a tiny speck of red light glowed, lingered a moment and vanished. Then another, then a green ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... ever with our faith. Its ideal perfection would be that it should be unbroken, undashed by any speck of doubt. But the reality is far different. It is no full-orbed completeness, but, at the best, a growing segment of reflected light, with many a rough place in its jagged outline, prophetic of increase; with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... beginning of his fourth month of solitude, the mucker saw a smudge of smoke upon the horizon. Slowly it increased in volume and the speck beneath it resolved itself into the hull of a steamer. Closer and closer to the ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and Stuart Mill; with the naturalists, to sound the depths of the argument as to the origin of species and the genesis of man; with the astronomers, to leave the narrow bounds of earth, and explore the illimitable spaces of the universe, in which our solar system is but a speck; with the mathematicians, to quit the uncertain realm of speculation and assumption, and plant our feet firmly on the rock of exact science:—to come back anon to lighter themes, and to revel in the grotesque ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... pardonable fashion of congealing under the stress of the Canadian winter, they generally showed signs of a thaw at the approach of spring. At the present moment he had no thought, no eyes, for anything save a mist-enshrouded speck far off across the waters of Lake Ontario. All the impatience and longing of the week just past found vent through his eyes, as he watched that pale, uncertain, scarcely visible mote on the horizon. As he reached the shore the fog lifted a little, and a great sunbeam, leaping ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... of Ida[32], there was a white Bull, which was the Glory of the Farmer to whom he belonged. This Bull had a beautiful black Speck between his Horns, all the rest of his Body being as white as Milk. With him the Gnossian and Cydonian Heifers were all in love, and eagerly longed to be embraced by him in the tenderest manner in which Bulls embrace the Fair ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... shoes neatly, buttoned his jacket closely over his shirt, and was just pinning up the rent in his hat, when Rags considerately brought another suggestion in the shape of an old chicken-wing, with which he brushed every speck of dust from his clothes. This done, and being no respecter of persons, he took the family comb to Rags, who woke the echoes during the operation, and hoped to the Lord that the squirrels would run slowly and that the field-mice would be very tender, ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fault with her where I default ne'er find, * Save haply that a speck in either eye may show: But if her eyes have fault, of fault her form hath none, * Slim-built above the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence (though even this is of a mystical and indirect kind), there is ample evidence that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be an utter coward and sneak. There is simply not one rag or thread or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be a good man. All that he is concerned with is the description of a definite and very real type of young man; the young man whose passions and whose selfish ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... his handkerchief carefully, wiped the last speck of Dry Lake dust from his shiny toes. "Yuh won't crawfish on me, if I tell yuh?" he inquired anxiously, standing up ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... looked, and behold! In a point to aeons withdrawn.... A scarce visible speck of light, His own sun like a mite, And the blur of ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... undistinguish'd quite, Save when she wheels direct from shade to light: The flutt'ring songstress a mere speck became, Like fancy's floating bubbles in a dream; He sees her yet, but yielding to repose, Unwittingly his jaded eyelids close. Delicious sleep! From sleep who could forbear, With no more guilt than Giles, and no more care? Peace o'er his slumbers ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... indeed have the least word to say on such matters, beyond suggesting them to the imagination of readers. The operas, the carnival gayeties, the intricate considerations and diplomacies of this Winter, at Berlin and elsewhere, may be figured: but here is one little speck, also from the Archives, which is worth saving. Princess Ulrique is in her twenty-third year, Princess Amelia in her twentieth; beautiful clever creatures, both; Ulrique the more staid of the two. "Never saw so gay a Carnival," said everybody; and in the height of it, with all manner of gayeties ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the offices," Volpatte went on, engrossed in his story of travel; "whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that my little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view of them. Non, I'd never have believed there'd be so many men on chairs while ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... at last. Each anxious heart welcomed and yet dreaded to see the new day. Sailors and officers swept the sea as it grew lighter, and, to their dread, just as the sun rose over the glossy surface of the sea, a snowy speck appeared far ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... better of him than she had done for a long time. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he was more in her thoughts than he had been; for, in the reign of Claudius, Barker had dwindled to a nearly insignificant speck in the landscape, dwarfed away to nothing by the larger mould and ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... a tiny speck of a boat way out on the horizon. Captain Dan said it was Shorty's boat with Adams. I suggested that, as we had to wait for wind to fly the kite, we run in and attract Shorty's attention. I certainly wanted some one else to ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... again to look at her necklace in the pool, and caught sight of a speck of vivid scarlet on the brow of the hill—another and another. They were the huntsmen returning from their unsuccessful run, for she had seen the breathless panting fox an hour before when he crossed the moor and made for his covert on the rocky sides of the cliffs. Once there, ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... except the Night-hawk, and he told the OLD-man that he would help him all he could; so he flew away up in the air—so far that he looked like a black speck. Then he came down straight and struck that rock an awful blow—'swow!'—and broke it in two pieces. Indeed he did. The blow was so great that it spoiled the Night-hawk's bill, forever—made it queer in shape, and jammed his head, so that it is queer, ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... distracted between the fear of injury to her beloved work and her desire to get off the island. But the little boat pulled swiftly down the channel, its owner evidently not desirous of being caught himself on the mud-flats, and was soon a speck on ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... nearer and nearer to the doomed ship, under the guidance of her able coxswain. As it passed under the stern a cheer burst from the crowd of eager faces that gazed over the side of the "Trident." Yet there were many hearts there that grew faint and chill when they beheld the little white speck that seemed to be their only hope of rescue in that dark hour. "What hope was there that such a nutshell should save them all?" they thought, perchance, on seeing it approach. They little knew the wonderful vitality of ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to be passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also longed for the sun; ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... panful was dried and blown, the gold was weighed, and put into a large white breakfast cup, the bottom of which was soon heaped up with shining particles, varying in size from the smallest visible speck, to little lumps like grains ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the visible and tangible universe, in the desires and cravings of this same human heart; this little human heart beating blindly beneath a waistcoat or a blouse. Its owner is little bigger than a beetle or an ant, and the habitat of that owner is a speck in space; a pygmy in comparison with Sirius or Arcturus, and invisible from the ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... seemed a little speck, And then it seemed a mist: It moved and moved, and took at last A certain ...
— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... forests. Hence the lake stretched northward, like some broad river, trenched between mountain ranges still leafless and gray. Then they looked down on Ticonderoga, with the flag of the Bourbons, like a flickering white speck, waving on its ramparts; and next on Crown Point with its tower of stone. Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the cry, "A wreck! a wreck! Pull mates, and waste no breath!"— They knew it, though 'twas but a speck Upon the edge ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... hollow or ravine to the left, and a few farm-houses sat among the trees on the hill-tops beyond. A battery was planted at each house, and we could see the lines of red-clay parapets marking the sites. From the roof of one of the houses floated a speck of canvas,—the revolutionary flag. A horseman or two moved shadow-like across a slope of yellow grain. Before and back the woods belted the landscape, and some pickets of both sides paced the river brink: they did not fire ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... speck was observed by the blacks. Their shouts attracted the attention of Don Benito, who, with a return of courtesy, approaching Captain Delano, expressed satisfaction at the coming of some supplies, slight and temporary as they must ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... murmured at intervals, and followed by chest-drawn sighs, expressed a deep preoccupation. With regard to his boots, he need have had no anxiety. They were of the shiniest patent leather, much too tight, and without a speck of dust upon them. But his nervousness infected me with a cruel dread. All those eyes were going to watch how we comported ourselves in jumping from the landing-steps into the boat! If this operation, upon a ceremonious occasion, has terrors even for a gondolier, how ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... once, and she rowed out from the port. Having proceeded some three or four miles, they lowered her sails, and lay to in the course a galley making for the port would take. A sailor was sent up to the masthead to keep a lookout. Late in the afternoon he called down that he could make out a black speck some twelve miles away. She carried no sails, and he judged her to ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... shore, Wave you farewell, and strain our eyes Till that bright speck which is your sail Is ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... half-pausing among the palmettos and rushes as the hurtling mass thundered by; then pushed quickly into the whirling dust of the track and hurried on between the clicking rails, not knowing that yonder dark, dwindling speck behind was bearing away from him strange tidings from ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... mass of long-winded ceremonial nothingnesses, and intricate Belleisle cobwebberies, we seize this one poor speck of human foolery in the native state, as almost the memorablest in that stupendous business. Stupendous indeed; with which all Germany has been in travail these sixteen months, on such terms! And in verity has got the thing called "German Kaiser" constituted, better or worse. Heavens, was a Nation ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... with arms uplifted, and holding deadly weapons, as if ready and determined to strike with well-aimed precision. But, strange to say, they all remained as motionless as statues, until we had gone on so far as to leave them a mere speck on ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... have done, and had been perfectly sinless and holy, and yet to-night I was to commit one sin, that sin, however small a sin in man's eyes,—that sin would be quite enough to shut me out of heaven. The gates would be shut against me for that one sin. No soul on which there is a speck of sin can ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... reached Paris, and he finally determined to take the course and reach the high position which the selfish hopes of his would-be mother-in-law pointed out to him. His cousin counted for no more than a speck in this brilliant perspective; but he went to see Annette. True woman of the world, Annette advised her old friend to make the marriage, and promised him her support in all his ambitious projects. In her heart she was enchanted to fasten an ugly and uninteresting ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... distances." A little later on, although he disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe. She found his simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husband it was easy, and with his help ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... whirlwinds of dust that arose settled quickly down, the desultory breezes which had caused them departing as mysteriously as they had come. In the blighting heat the country lay, dead, spreading to the infinite horizons; in the sky no speck floated against the dome of blue. More desolate than a derelict on the calm surface of the trackless ocean Lazette lay, its huddled buildings dingy with the dust of a continuing dry season, squatting in their dismal lonesomeness in the shimmering, ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... thinking I loved you so little as to be biased against our marriage because of money troubles. Pooh!" she flicked away a speck of dust from his coat, "I don't care that for ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... rise high out of the water and the sharp-nosed whaleback for'ard go down as if weighted heavily. And it was—with a bag of dollars lashed underneath. When in the early morning the whaleship sighted the drifting speck, floating on the bosom of a now placid sea, the thoughtful Down-East skipper—observant of the canoe's bows being under water—lowered a boat and pulled over to it. He took the bag of dollars and muttering something about ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... glints in heaven may be a lowin' sun, Though like a speck of light it seem amid the welkin dun; The humblest sodger on the field may win a warrior's crest: The birdie sure to sing is the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they stood upon the broad gravel-walk before the Warren-house. The building was profoundly dark, and none were moving near it save themselves. From one solitary turret-chamber, however, there shone a ray of light; and towards this speck of comfort in the cold, cheerless, silent scene, Mr Willet bade his ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... room carefully shaded, and as cool as was possible in such heat. The floor had been sprinkled with water, flowers stood wherever there was room for them, and all his properties in scrolls and other matters had found places in chests or on shelves. There was not a speck of dust to be seen, and a sweet pervading perfume greeted his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had lost a leg in the War. It was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames to have left him five thousand pounds of Timothy's money. They sat down together in the little drawing-room, whose walls—like a vision of heaven—were sky-blue and gold with every picture-frame unnaturally bright, and every speck of dust removed from every piece of furniture, to read that little masterpiece—the Will of Timothy. With his back to the light in Aunt Hester's chair, Soames faced Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt Ann's sofa; and, crossing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... mountain to the west. It comes up out of the distance and goes down into the distance again, and it is named Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean. To the northward red rocks, smooth and bare of soil, and without any speck of moss or herbage, slope up to the very lips of the Polar wind, and there is nothing else there by the noise of his anger. Very peaceful are the Inner Lands, and very fair are their cities, and there is no war ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Eskimo, and it was with this thought of the lifelessness and mystery of a dead and empty world that Philip turned his eyes from the sun into the gray desolation that reached from Pierre Thoreau's door to the end of the earth. Far off to the north he saw a black speck moving in the chaos of white. It might have been a fox coming over a snow-dune a rifle-shot away, for distances are elusive where the sky and the earth seem to meet in a cold gray rim about one; or it might have been a musk-ox or a caribou at ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... impressed Anthony as a cold-blooded, highly schooled person, absolutely devoid of sentiment. His face was stony, his eyes were cool, even his linen partook of his own unruffled calm. He seemed by no means effeminate, yet he was one of those immaculate beings upon whom one can scarcely imagine a speck of dust or a bead of perspiration. His hair—what was left of it—was parted to a nicety, his clothes were faultless, and he had an air of ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... all for mercy's sake. When the reapers in harvest-time saw a figure whirling past in a cloud of dust, or the family at the foot of Glen Urtach, gathered round the fire on a winter's night, heard the rattle of a horse's hoofs on the road, or the shepherds, out after the sheep, traced a black speck moving across the snow to the upper glen, they knew it was the doctor, and, without being conscious of ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... their business—spiders, butterflies, and centipedes, ants, beetles, and flies, and mysterious entities that crawl nameless under foot. A pea-hen shrieks in the grass, and a kite whistles aloft. A remote speck in the sky denotes a watchful vulture, alert for any mishap to the citizens of the woods, and a crash of twigs may mean anything from a buck to a rhinoceros. There is a hectic on the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... crosses or curses; but that to come with neither. There shall be no more curse: and as for crosses, all tears shall be wiped from the eyes of them that dwell there. There will be nothing but ravishing pleasures, and holy; there will be no cessation of joys, nor any speck of pollution. 'In thy presence is fullness of joy, at thy right hand there are pleasures ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... A dust-speck, facing the infinitudes Of Thine unfathomable dome, a night like this,— To stand full-face to Thy High Majesties, Thy myriad worlds in solemn watchfulness,— Watching, watching, watching all below, And man in all his wilfulness ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... says Jacka, "for I was just about stepping down to call you. See that lugger, yonder?" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at a speck in the grey from which the Van der Werf was now running at something ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you will have seen how England is flooded, and you will like to hear that this tiny speck has escaped. The Lodden is over the park, and turns the beautiful water meadows down to Strathfieldsaye into a no less beautiful lake, two or three times a week; but then it subsides as quickly as it rises, so there ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... was distinctly coming on. Billy opened one eye, then the other, and hastily scanned the sky in either direction for an aeroplane, but the sky was as clear as crystal without a speck, and the sound was ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... from his table; He kisses his child and wife; Then he haunts a wood, till he orphans a brood, Or robs a deer of its life. He aims at a speck in the azure; Winged love, that has flown at a call; It reels down to die, and he lets it lie; His pleasure was ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... time that of my fellow-pupil whom I have maligned.' Now, young gentlemen, it gives me pain to address you all for one boy's sin, and I have only this to say, that you whose consciences are clear can let it pass away like a cloud; to him who has this black speck upon his conscience I only say I am waiting; come to me when the examination is done.—Mr Morris, it is ten minutes past ten. At one o'clock your examination is over, and the studies are at an end for the day.—Now, my dear boys, I wish you all success, and I trust that you will show Mr Morris ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... wrongs The bears aveng'd, at its departure saw Elijah's chariot, when the steeds erect Rais'd their steep flight for heav'n; his eyes meanwhile, Straining pursu'd them, till the flame alone Upsoaring like a misty speck he kenn'd; E'en thus along the gulf moves every flame, A sinner so enfolded close in each, That none exhibits token of the theft. Upon the bridge I forward bent to look, And grasp'd a flinty mass, or else had fall'n, Though push'd not from the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... be plenty to do in a short while, but meanwhile he enjoyed the sensation of being on a tiny world in space with only a handful of Planeteers for company. He smiled. "King Foster," he said to himself. "Monarch of a thorium space speck." It was a rather nice feeling, even though he laughed at himself for thinking it. Since he was in command of the detachment, he could in all truth say this was his own personal planet. It would be a good bit of space humor to spring on the folks ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... begun the deluge lessened. The walls, running with mud, were crumbling and falling here and there in miniature landslides. Scamp was plunging badly in the soft ground, and so Roy slowed him down to a trot. He could not, he told himself grimly, get one speck wetter. There was little use in hurrying. With sudden recollection of his bundles, Roy glanced back. Only a wisp of wet brown paper sticking to the cantle remained; the water had soaked the wrappings—baking powder, flavoring extract, dried fruit, and all the rest ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... on before entering the drawing-room, and be careful that there is no speck of mud upon your ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... flotilla that accompanied us during the last two days was made up mostly of American and British destroyers, though there were two French boats among them. They made a lively scene, and surely gave us great protection. If a speck would appear on the horizon, two boats would be off to investigate it, and would return later to join the fleet. We were also accompanied on the last day of the voyage by two airplanes as a further protection ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... cried Yvon, as soon as his head appeared above the water, and he began to swim as tranquilly as if he had been bathing in the lake of the old castle. Happily the moon was rising. Yvon saw, at a little distance, a black speck among the silvery waves—it was land. He approached it, not without difficulty, and finally succeeded in gaining a foothold. Dripping wet, exhausted with fatigue, and out of breath, he dragged himself on the sand, then, without ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... about, but he passively refused. The boy still swam, but the boat was not yet half-way, and headed too much to the left. There was no tiller, and the men could only guess at their course. We guided them by signs, watching the boy's head, now a mere speck, seen at intervals under the lowering sky. He struggled gallantly; the boat drew nearer, and one of the men stood up and looked around. We watched with breathless suspense for the reappearance of the brave young swimmer, but we watched in vain. Poor boy! who can know what was the agony of ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... hoofs were then blacked and polished, the mouths washed, and their teeth picked. It is related that after this grooming the master of the stables was accustomed to flick over their coats a clean muslin handkerchief, and if this revealed a speck of dust the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... sea for something, and presently he found it. Viewed from the height at which they flew it looked no more than a white speck in a great blue saucer, but presently the machine began to dip, falling at a terrific rate of speed, which took away the breath of the man who was hanging on with both hands ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... mine. Ere our household shake off slumber, the rocks will have again closed over the chasm not to be re-opened by me, nor perhaps by others, for ages yet unguessed. Think of me sometimes, and with kindness. When I reach the life that lies beyond this speck in time, I shall look round for thee. Even there, the world consigned to thyself and thy people may have rocks and gulfs which divide it from that in which I rejoin those of my race that have gone before, and I may be powerless to cleave ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... New Orleans victory; voted against Jackson, but lived long enough to wish we had another just like him; remembered when the first steamer struck the North river with its wheel-buckets; was startled by the birth of telegraphy; saw the United States grow from a speck on the world's map till all nations dip their flag at our passing merchantmen. He was born while the Revolutionary cannon were coming home from Yorktown, and lived to hear the tramp of troops returning from the war of the great Rebellion. He lived to speak ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... himself the only figure on it. With hair and whiskers deficient in colour at all times, but feebler than common in the rich sunshine, and more like the coat of a sandy tortoise-shell cat; with long nails, nicely pared and sharpened; with a natural antipathy to any speck of dirt, which made him pause sometimes and watch the falling motes of dust, and rub them off his smooth white hand or glossy linen: Mr Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... word Against the good and gracious Lord, from out their lips be heard. But with their wildly gleaming eyes they gazed out o'er the main. Wave rolling after wave was all that answered back again. On the horizon's distant verge not even a speck was seen, But the cresting foam of breaking waves still shimmering between. And fiercer yet, as hour by hour went slowly creeping by, The famine wrung their tortured frames till it were bliss to die. And hopes of further aid grew faint, and it did seem that they Out on the waste ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... full in the face. It was like seeing suddenly at close quarters some great bright monument that one has long known only as a sun-caught speck in the distance. He saw the large violet eyes open to him, and their lashes curling to him; the vivid parted lips; and the black ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... having mastered his passion. Laura had become but a speck on the distant horizon, a passing incident of his youth. But he sighed for Avignon. There was life and animation, music, literature, art, oratory and the society of great men. Besides he wanted to prove to his own satisfaction ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... crystal may be, when reduced even to small size it will be found that the crystals are still of the same shape. If this process is taken still further, and the substance is ground to the finest impalpable powder, as fine as floating dust, when placed under the microscope each speck, though perhaps invisible to the naked eye, will be seen a perfect crystal, of the identical shape as that from which it came, one so large maybe that its planes and angles might have been measured and defined by rule and compass. This shows how impossible it ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... a fair wind, and the fatherland in sight, a sea like a mill-pond, the melancholy sound of the ripples, a fair, solitary vessel, gliding across the surface of the water like a woman stealing out to a tryst—it was a picture full of harmony. That mere speck full of movement was a starting-point whence the soul of man could descry the immutable vast of space. Solitude and bustling life, silence and sound, were all brought together in strange abrupt ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... musicians, at table with his own family, at the Palace, while he is playing without a thought of what he is playing, for the entertainment of Royal folk—it is in that future, that future which a speck may bring toppling to earth—no matter, it is ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... "Reverend Abraham, can you see well afar off?" and when I answered that I once could see very well, but that the many tears I had shed had now peradventure dimmed my eyes, he pointed to the Streckelberg, and said, "Do you then see nothing there?" Ego. "Naught save a black speck, which I cannot make out." Ille. "Know then that that is the pile whereon your daughter is to burn at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, and which the constables are now raising." When this hell-hound ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... want these would-be murderers to know how their trick failed. That's the reason I didn't pound the brute to a jelly on the bed, for it would have made such a mess on the sheet. Now there isn't a speck on it. I'll take the vase with me into my room and finish the cobra off. In the morning I'll get rid of its body somehow. When these devils find tomorrow that you're not dead, they'll be very puzzled. Now, the question is, what are you ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the woods that same afternoon by way of the bridge, in order to buy some provisions at the brick store. When he was still a long distance from the bars that divided the lane from the highroad, he espied a dark-clad little speck he knew to be Rodman leaning over the fence, waiting and longing as usual for his home-coming, and his heart warmed at the thought of the boyish ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... D, an older blossom, with similar analyses (E and F). Both sorts are to be found upon every spike of bloom, as the inflorescence begins at the base and proceeds upward. As we look into the more open flower we observe a dark-colored speck, which, by analysis, proves to be the lid of the anther. This portion is further shown enlarged in Fig. 20, A. If we gently lift it with a pin, we disclose the pollen masses in the cavity (B) thus opened (C, profile section), the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... shaggy mane by which came his name floating over his shoulders. Out into the sunshine of a perfect day the riders went, and the group around the platform stood silently and watched until they were a speck in the distance blurring with the sunny plain and ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... Some prepossession, such as starts amiss, by but a hair's-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o' the feeler, dip he ne'er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide o' the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck." ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... point of land and came in view of a short line of beach. Deep set in a narrow bay, it might have escaped the eye of a less observant person than Marian; so, too, might the white speck that shone from the brown surface ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... they were singing a second song, something happened. A light speck was seen moving through the air. It came nearer and nearer. At last it circled round the pen, where the grain was scattered. Then it flew slowly to the ground. It ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... when you climb on the fence to watch mama out of sight. The women in the alley poke their heads out of doorways and watch her too. You know her by the way she holds her shoulders till she is only a speck in a chain of specks— till she is swallowed up. But suppose that day after day you were to watch for her face and it didn't come back? Suppose it were to drop out of the string of white faces like the pearl out of my chain I never ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... broadcloth." "Oh, don't, don't," she protested, on the point of tears, but he smiled and patted her bowed shoulder. "I got over that long ago, honey," he said gently. "I kicked powerful hard with my one foot at first, but the dust I raised wasn't a speck in the face of God Almighty. There, there, we'll have a fine sunrise, and I'm going out to watch it from my old bench—unless you'll find something for a single hand to do." She shook her head, smiling ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... day. Silent with upturn'd eyes unbreathing crowds Pursue the floating wonder to the clouds; And, flush'd with transport or benumb'd with fear, Watch, as it rises, the diminish'd sphere. 35 —Now less and less!—and now a speck is seen!— And now the fleeting rack obtrudes between!— With bended knees, raised arms, and suppliant brow To every shrine with mingled cries they vow.— "Save Him, ye Saints! who o'er the good preside; 40 "Bear Him, ye Winds! ye Stars ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching the speck of a pin-prick. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... easy," said Sahwah soothingly. "They haven't upset. There isn't a speck of water in the boats. They've simply floated off and left the folks somewhere. What were the Hares doing out in boats, anyway?" she mused. "But if they're along the shore here somewhere we ought to ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... Rito became suspicious. Again he looked, but the spot or object, whatever it might be, had gone out of sight altogether. He crawled over to the man nearest him, told him what had occurred, and returned to his post. The dark speck or thing had not reappeared; but on the right side of the gallery formed by the trees it seemed as if, somewhat nearer to his own position, something black became apparent and disappeared in an instant. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... it were o'er! A heavy gloom Hangs on my spirits, like some threat'ning cloud O'erspreading the wide firmament, without One speck of blue, like hope, to cheer th' horizon. Yet, from what cause it springs, I cannot tell. His sword I fear not. It is mine estate, So promising. He that hath nought to lose, Is spurr'd to action with the hope ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... initiated said, was De Lancy's South African wife, with a rooted objection to being a lady or "moving in social circles"; whose pleasure lay in managing this big household under De Lancy's guidance. There were those who said they had seen her brush a speck of dust from De Lancy's coat-collar, as she emerged from her morning interview with him; and others who said they had seen her hidden in the shrubbery listening to the rather flaccid conversation of her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... back again at the water in bewilderment, as if her senses were the victim of some sleight of hand. Not a speck or spot resembling a man's head or face showed anywhere. By this time she was alarmed, and her alarm intensified when she perceived a little beyond the scene of her husband's bathing a small area of water, the quality of whose surface ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... Zachariah dwelt on the first floor. He was too weak to go upstairs by himself, and he and his friend therefore walked into the front room together. It was in complete order, although it was so early in the morning. Everything was dusted; even the lower fire-bar had not a speck of ashes on it, and on the hob already was a saucepan in which Mrs. Coleman proposed to cook the one o'clock dinner. On the walls were portraits of Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright, and the mezzotint ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... his page, and so leaves it. These are deficiencies lying very bare to criticism; and I confess I never could completely understand them in such a man. He that would have ordered arrest for the smallest speck of mud on a man's buff-belt, indignant that any pipe-clayed portion of a man should not be perfectly pipeclayed: how could he tolerate false spelling, and commas shaken as out of a pepper-box over his page? It is probable he cared little about Literature, after all; cared, at least, only about ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... noticing the giver, or thanking him. The wound was bound up, and the party proceeded along the hill towards the back part, from which they enjoyed an extensive view across the green labyrinth of the park to the wide-spreading ocean. The view was truly a magnificent one. A slight speck was observed on the horizon, between the dark flood and the azure sky. "A telescope!" called out Mr. John; but before any of the servants could answer the summons the gray man, with a modest bow, drew his hand from his pocket, and presented a beautiful Dollond's telescope to Mr. John, who, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... afternoon, to get a little fresh air to strengthen me for the coming night, when I had determined to watch with Polly beside little John, if he was still living. My young friends, Bob and Harry, joined me, and we were pacing up and down together watching the tide come in when we thought we saw a dark speck far out to sea. ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds. Talk o' spirits! I tell you there was millions on 'em! And the lights and the colours—oh, but it's no good talkin'! I looked back and wanted to know where the earth was, and there I see it, dwindled to a speck o' light. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... companions becoming counts, dukes, and marshals of the empire, whilst he remained an untitled general of division; he and his officers, as one of them told me, then felt themselves little better circumstanced than myself—than prisoners in an almost forgotten speck of the globe, with their promotion suspended. Rumours of a premeditated attack at length reached the island, which it was said the captain-general heard with pleasure; and it was attributed to the prospect of making military levies on the inhabitants, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... he does with it. You pick up every single speck," ordered the girl; and the boy scraped the floor with his sharp finger-nails, and crammed the candy and dust into a small paper bag. The girl stood watchfully over him; not the smallest particle escaped her eyes. "There's ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sun, large and important as he is, is but a speck in creation. These myriads of stars that shine nightly in the heavens are all suns. It is calculated that the union of the telescope with the photographic plate brings five hundred millions of these stars into view. Some of them are demonstrated to be hundreds of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Sieberer's face, but it disappeared quickly when he happened to turn his eyes to the neighboring mountains. He looked keenly and searchingly toward the mountain-path leading to Mittewald. He saw there a small black speck which was advancing with great rapidity. Was it a bird? No, the speck had already become larger; he saw it was a human being—a woman speeding along the mountain-path. Now she was so close to them that he could distinguish ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... a schooner of about ninety tons being then so far completed, as to be nearly ready to be put in the water. Such was the state of things, when, one fine night, we arrived in the manner already related. The French kept constant look-outs, and it seems we were seen, a distant speck on the ocean, just as the sun set, while the low trees of the island eluded our vigilance. By the aid of a good night-glass, our movements were watched, and a boat was about to be sent out to warn us of our danger, when we passed within the reef. Captain ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... viewpoint he could not give any direct proof regarding this idea of a pre-existence of the soul, still he could not deny it entirely when he said: "The shaping forces which have made our bodies and our minds what they are may always have been psychical forces—from the first living slime-speck to the complex intelligences of to-day." "The old transmigrationist's view would thus possess a share of truth and the actual man would be the resultant not only of intermingling heredities on father's and mother's sides, but of intermingling heredities, one of planetary and one of cosmic ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... lo, How small the biggest parts of earth's proud title shew! Where shall I find the noble British land? Lo, I at last a northern speck espy, Which in the sea does lie, And seems a grain o' the sand. For this will any sin, or bleed? Of civil wars is this the meed? And is it this, alas, which we, Oh, irony of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Hudson, "into that wonderful world which lies in a drop of water, crossed by some stems of green weed, to see transparent living mechanism at work, and to gain some idea of its modes of action, to watch a tiny speck that can sail through the prick of a needle's point; to see its crystal armour flashing with ever varying tint, its head glorious with the halo of its quivering cilia; to see it gliding through the emerald stems, hunting for its food, snatching at its prey, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... wolves, which the mayor of Solignie had cautioned me against, as abounding throughout the country. We travelled, after leaving the main road, at the distance of a league, through a country scarcely appearing to be inhabited. Here and there a lone cot, a mere speck, met the eye amidst a landscape composed of nothing but barren wastes and thick forests, nearly impervious to the light. We had penetrated about half a mile through one of the latter, my attention occupied with the romantic wildness of the scene, when we were alarmed ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... spots—content if the plough, the fertilizer and the trimming-axe, will but keep away and let it alone. After a long rain, when everything looks bright, often have I stopt in my wood-saunters, south or north, or far west, to take in its dusky green, wash'd clean and sweet, and speck'd copiously with its fruit of clear, hardy blue. The wood of the cedar is of use—but what profit on earth are those sprigs of acrid plums? A question impossible to answer satisfactorily. True, some of the herb doctors give them for stomachic affections, but the remedy is as bad as the disease. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... waited and waited, and watched the place. If it was crossing a gully, it would climb out again, of course. When it did not do so she lost all patience and was putting the glasses in their case when she saw a speck crawling along a level bit, half a mile or so to the left of where she had ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... sailing by Triest Where a day or two we harbored: A sunset was in the West, When, looking over the vessel's side, One of our company espied A sudden speck to larboard. And as a sea-duck flies and swims At once, so came the light craft up, With its sole lateen sail that trims And turns (the water round its rims Dancing, as round a sinking cup) And by us like a fish it curled, And drew itself up close beside, Its great sail on the instant ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... whistling of the night breeze among the bushes and the brambles of the downs. But the people who were approaching were doubtless mistrustful people, for this real silence and apparent solitude did not satisfy them. Their boat, therefore, scarcely as visible as a dark speck upon the ocean, glided along noiselessly, avoiding the use of their oars for fear of being heard, and gained ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... do here, when you leff? 'speck ebbery ting be dull, wuss nor ditch-water. No more fun—no more shuffle-foot. Old maussa no like de fiddle, and nebber hab party and jollication like udder people. Don't tink I can stay here, Mass Ra'ph, after you gone; ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... We are a good deal above the present bed of the stream, and should probably have to sink a considerable distance before we got down to paying ground; that young fellow said they have hardly found a speck of gold. It would be a risky thing to do; still, we can think it over, there's ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... an' talk about Their claes being owd an' rotten, An' still being forc'd to speck an' clout,(4) It's sich a price is cotton. T' owd men sit round, wi' pipe an' glass, In earnest conversation; On t' ways an' means o' saving brass, An' t' rules an' t' laws o' t' nation, They ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... science has called "matter." We see in operation a wonderful something called "force" or "energy" in its countless forms of manifestations. We see things that we call "forms of life," varying in manifestation from the tiny speck of slime that we call the Moneron, up to that form ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... was there, and so, putting the two together, I 'llowed that for once there might be some truth in a Horsford rumor. I reckon it must have been a lie, though; or else she 'kicked' you, which she wouldn't stand a speck about doing, even if you were the President, if you didn't come up to her notion. It's a mighty high notion, too, let me tell you; and the man that gits up to it'll have to climb. Bet your ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the most gigantic wind-wheels hung this crow's nest, a clear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck on a spear of metallic filigree, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was drawn in a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway down the frail-seeming stem was a light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes—minute they looked from above—rotating slowly on the ring of its outer ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the lake that stretches blue to the eastward there appears a distant canoe, a mere speck, no bigger than a bird far ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... speaking in a low, passionate voice. In spite of herself, Violet Oliver was moved. The picture of him watching from his window in the tower for the black speck against the skyline was clear before her mind, and troubled her. Her voice ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... dreary mass of long-winded ceremonial nothingnesses, and intricate Belleisle cobwebberies, we seize this one poor speck of human foolery in the native state, as almost the memorablest in that stupendous business. Stupendous indeed; with which all Germany has been in travail these sixteen months, on such terms! And in verity has got the thing called "German Kaiser" constituted, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... keep Honest Moses fum de debil. Dat nigger's not got no religion to his name—not a speck. Didn't I tell Missus when she thought she cotched me and Ransom sellin' watermillions and sweet 'tatoes to de boys from Marietta, dat ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... were great noying to mankind. For all that see his eyen, should die anon, and the same kind hath the cockatrice, and the serpent that is bred in the province of Sirena; and hath a body in length and in breadth as the cockatrice, and a tail of twelve inches long, and hath a speck in his head as a precious stone, and feareth away all serpents with hissing. And he presseth not his body with much bowing, but his course of way is forthright, and goeth in mean. He drieth and burneth leaves and herbs, not only with touch ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... upon Botello; but Juan and Alfonzo were upon the alert, and, drawing their long daggers, rushed to his defence. Never was there a more desperate conflict than on that starlit night, in that frail boat, that floated a feeble, solitary speck of humanity on the bosom of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... pahdin', sah," and Private Massay of "B" Troop, who was the commanding officer's orderly for the day, spoke up, "Ef de Cap'n could git in through de little doah in de stoah-room, and go through de kitchen, I speck he could git ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... long Has bronzed and shrivelled sere her face and neck; Her locks are wild and grey, her teeth a wreck; Her foot is vast, her bowed leg spare and strong. A wide blue cloak, a squat and sturdy throng Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck, A white vest broidered black, her person deck, Nor seems their picked, stern, old-world quaintness wrong. Her great creel forehead-slung, she wanders nigh, Easing the heavy strap with gnarled, ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... word, but saluted deliberately, and watched his brother's boat recede, till it was a speck upon the sea, as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... canst never return to mine. Ere our household shake off slumber, the rocks will have again closed over the chasm not to be re-opened by me, nor perhaps by others, for ages yet unguessed. Think of me sometimes, and with kindness. When I reach the life that lies beyond this speck in time, I shall look round for thee. Even there, the world consigned to thyself and thy people may have rocks and gulfs which divide it from that in which I rejoin those of my race that have gone before, and I may be ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... quiet and peaceful as if there were no such things as hurricanes and angry waves, and dotted here and there by the glistening sails of inward bound vessels. Far away to the westward a long black wreath of smoke, following in the wake of a small speck on the water, announced the approach of the Havana steam packet; and close in, hugging the shore, glided a solitary American barque, apparently bound to Havana to finish her freight, her white sails gleaming in the sun. The land seemed strangely ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... know that the clearer the mirror the slighter will be the breath necessary to stain it; on the breast of an unsullied shirt the most minute speck will be offensively visible. So it is with human character and integrity. Had Bryan M'Mahon belonged to a family of mere ordinary reputation—to a family who had generally participated in all the good and evil of ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the water in bewilderment, as if her senses were the victim of some sleight of hand. Not a speck or spot resembling a man's head or face showed anywhere. By this time she was alarmed, and her alarm intensified when she perceived a little beyond the scene of her husband's bathing a small area of water, the quality of whose surface differed from that of the ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... forerunner of the calamity under which his heart now grieved so bitterly. Aphiz Adegah's life had been a bold one, he knew no fear. The air of his native hills was not freer than his own spirit and as he looked off once more at the tiny white speck in the distance that marked the spot where Komel was, his resolution was instantly made, and he swore to ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... collecting rubbish, brush, old wood, and sods, and converting them into ashes or charcoal, is one which we could often adopt with decided advantage. Our premises would be cleaner, and we should have less fungus to speck and crack our apples and pears, and, in addition, we should have a quantity of ashes or burnt earth, that is not only a manure itself, but is specially useful to mix with moist superphosphate and other artificial ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... home. A very bright planet shone before him and drew a trenchant wake along the water. He took that for his line and followed it. That was the last earthly thing that he should look upon; that radiant speck, which he had soon magnified into a City of Laputa, along whose terraces there walked men and women of awful and benignant features, who viewed him with distant commiseration. These imaginary spectators consoled him; he told ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... every eye strained. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky. In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling sweeping towards us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... application of ridicule, effect something at once; their course may be swift and cloudy, like that of the bullet, but it has a definite end in view; they are discharged and sweep away invisibly, or like a dark speck at most, but the crash and shiver of the distant target show that the shot has told. They are practical, and the American understands them; as for mere wit and humor, he will perhaps investigate them when there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... picture was turned where the light fell best upon it; the dirt might lie thick upon every inch in the room, but every morning a silk handkerchief carefully removed from the glass-mounting every disfiguring speck. Yet the man himself seemed to have little enough sentiment about him. His shoulders were broad and his head massive. A short-cut beard concealed his chin, but his mouth was of iron and his eyes were hard and keen. He was ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... parents and grandparents, were among the first to appear. They saw the black speck sail swiftly from the east, and hover like a bird of ill omen over the meadows. No alarm sounded from the camp, but suddenly from the shadows three French planes shot into the air. Two at once engaged the enemy, while a third cut off his retreat. The battle was soon over. There were sharp reports ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... don't want these would-be murderers to know how their trick failed. That's the reason I didn't pound the brute to a jelly on the bed, for it would have made such a mess on the sheet. Now there isn't a speck on it. I'll take the vase with me into my room and finish the cobra off. In the morning I'll get rid of its body somehow. When these devils find tomorrow that you're not dead, they'll be very puzzled. Now, the question is, what are ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... unfamiliar to its almost child-like features, and it was not easy for her to smile in her ordinary bright way at the round of scolding which Priscilla administered every morning to the maids who swept and scrubbed and dusted and scoured the kitchen till no speck of dirt was anywhere visible, till the copper shone like mirrors, and the tables were nearly as smooth as polished silver or ivory. Going into the dairy where pans of new milk stood ready for skimming, and looking out for a moment through the lattice window, she saw old Hugo Jocelyn and ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wild creatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he finds his match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speck against the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen to be secreted in the bushes, or behind the fence near which he alights! One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the form, structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field of vision,—indeed, can ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... there where fiery sea blends and merges with fiery sky, a tiny black speck has just come into view. Larger and larger it grows as it draws nearer to the land, now it seems like a bird with wings outspread—an eagle flying swiftly ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... I am with them As they clear the island bar,— Fade, till speck by speck the midday ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... hand a little pool of quicksilver, and placing me under a powerful shaded lamp, so that a ray of light caught the mercury pool, he told me to look at the bright spot for a quarter of an hour, remaining motionless meanwhile. Any one who has shared this experience with me, knows how the speck of light flashes and grows until that little pool of quicksilver seems to fill the entire horizon, darting out gleaming rays like an Aurora Borealis. I felt myself growing dazed and hypnotised, when Sir Charles emptied the mercury from my hand, and commenced making ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... contraction, which he gives it when it is to be used in tanning thick leather; two, three, or four days, are enough for tanning the thinner kind of leather. Leather which is not sufficiently impregnated with the tanning principle, is generally known by a white speck or streak, which is observable in the middle of its substance. We can affirm that those hides which were tanned in our presence, in a few days, were completely tanned, as the above mentioned white streak was ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... him's goin' down to the North end of the Island for another load o' grub and camp gear," drawled Kayak Bill as he finished scouring out a burned place in the frying pan. "You can't tell a speck about how long this here weather's goin' to last and we want to get under cover soon as possible. Besides—" the old man's eyes twinkled—"Gregg here looks too durned lady-like in this la-de-dah outfit." He pointed to the scarlet blanket. "What he needs is a pair o' pants. Pants, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... the delicate skin of the infant, the result of which shows itself in the eruption on the body and face of a number of small dry pimples sometimes surrounded by a little redness, itching considerably, and when their top has been rubbed off by scratching having a little speck of ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... six miles from Eufaula, and I should think that the improvement in some of the cabins was not very much in advance of what it was in Slavery. The cabins are made with doors, but not, to my recollection, a single window pane or speck of plastering; and yet even in some of those lowly homes I met with hospitality. A room to myself is a luxury that I do not always enjoy. Still I live through it, and find life rather interesting. The people have much to learn. The condition of the women is not very enviable in some cases. They ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the fences, darkened the air with dust, and seemed to promise rain, but ever it dispersed whence it came, taking with it the few clouds it had gathered up; and for weeks and weeks at a stretch, from horizon to horizon, was never a speck to mar the cruel dazzling brilliance ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... of clear, salt water that lay between them), to a little mossy promontory with the sea splashing round it, I looked back again to see who next was stirring. Still, there were only the early grooms with their horses, and one gentleman with a little dark speck of a dog running before him, and one water-cart coming out of the town to get water for the baths. In another minute or two, the distant bathing machines would begin to move, and then the elderly gentlemen of regular habits and sober quaker ladies would be coming to take their salutary morning ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... with their boisterous acclamations and the friendly pressure of seven or eight felonious hands, he was ushered into a cell white as driven snow, and his housewifely duties explained to him, under a heavy penalty if a speck of dirt should ever be discovered on his little wall, his little floor, his little table, or if his cocoa-bark mattress should not be neatly rolled up after use, and the strap tight, and the steel hook polished like glass, and his little brass gas-pipe glittering ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... her heart the more, when, bringing her gaze back from the horizon to the castle, she beheld its walls surrounded on all sides by the deep waters of the lake, on whose wide surface a single boat, where Little Douglas was fishing, was rocking like a speck. For some moments Mary's eyes mechanically rested on this child, whom she had already seen upon her arrival, when suddenly a horn sounded from the Kinross side. At the same moment Little Douglas threw away his line, and began to row towards the shore whence the signal had ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... again close to him, her face brimming with a humorous enthusiasm. Humour in Riseholme was apt to be a little unkind; if you mentioned the absurdities of your friends, there was just a speck of malice in your wit. But with her there was none of that, she gave an imitation of Mrs Weston with the most ruthless fidelity, and yet it was kindly to the bottom. She liked her for talking in that emphatic voice and being so particular as to what time it was. "Now first of all you are ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... service car thundered by the little house asleep. But the police did not glance that way—nor did the big, white-capped man glance that way. His eyes were fixed on the racer ahead—dwindling to a speck in its cloud of dust. He pushed up his visor and laughed aloud. "Give it up!" he said genially, "give it up!—you can't catch that car!—I know my own car, I guess!" He laughed again. "We shall find it somewhere along the road—when he ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... returns of this day to you—and you—and you, Sir—nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same—you understand me—a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of Egingwah spied a moving speck on the slope of the mountain to our left. "Tooktoo," he cried, and the party came to an instant standstill. Knowing that the successful pursuit of a single buck reindeer might mean a long run, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... to repent of his yesterdays, let him contemplate them all over during his waking hours in the morning. Then, indeed, is his time. He becomes ashamed before the monotonous rose-bushes that speck the wall, and as his wandering orbs scan the picture-nails and the cobwebs in search of distraction, he will realize the necessity of amendment more fully than the eloquence of a multitude could paint it. It was the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... later the sleeper sat up, flicked a speck of dust off his coat-sleeve, and, diving into a pocket, produced a note-book and blue pencil and began to write rapidly. Evidently his occupation was a pleasant one, for a broad ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... morning when Hadow raised the island, a fleecy speck of cloud against the sky line, and he shortened sail at once and lingered out the day so as to bring him up to it by dark. After supper every light on board was doused, and the great hull, gliding through the glass-smooth water, merged her steep sides and towering yards and canvas into the universal ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... impossible to describe. The thought at last came to me that we must be somewhere in the vicinity of the old California Crossing. I crawled back to the boat and told my companion to go ahead, while I continually used the field glass. After fifteen minutes, I discovered a white speck in the eastern horizon. We were soon over our fright, and with light hearts were sailing over the rippling waters of the old Platte feeling assured that we would soon reach a place of safety, as far as the Indians ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... handkerchief and flicked a speck of dust from his clothes. He was an exception to the rule that revolutionaries care nothing about their persons—Russian ones especially. He said that it was because his mother was an English-woman, and England ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... her deed has been like a broken vase, whose perfume has exhaled for two thousand years, and shall go on diffusing sweetness to the end of time. Last of all, after the rich men of Alexandria had cast their rattling gold into the brazen treasury, a poor widow cast a speck of dust called two mites, and, lo! this humble deed gave ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... couples and trios about the trees, more or less noisy and loquacious. About noon a thin white veil began to blur the distant southern mountains. It was like a white dream slowly descending upon them. The first flake or flakelet that reached me was a mere white speck that came idly circling and eddying to the ground. I could not see it after it alighted. It might have been a scale from the feather of some passing bird, or a larger mote in the air that the stillness was allowing to settle. Yet it ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... grieving skies o'ercast, For such migration my poor wing was strong But once; it has no power to fare again Forth o'er the heads of men, Nor other Summers for its Sanctuary: But from your mind's chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among your soul's forlornest things; A speck upon your memory, alack! A dead fly ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... and, that the number of vegetable species on the surface of the earth ought not to be estimated under 100,000. We may be struck at the amount of this number; but our astonishment abates when we find that our own island, which is but a mere misty speck, compared with those broad zones of sunshine, "where the flowers ever brighten," contains about 1,500 native flowering plants. Of those which have been described, about 8,000, or nearly one-sixth, belong to the first of the two classes, and of these nearly 2,000 are grasses. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... at length, lo! scarce a speck Was on the child from heel to neck, Though she was sorely mired; Nor gave she sign of grief's unrest, Till, hid upon her mother's breast, She wept till she ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... to-night I was to commit one sin, that sin, however small a sin in man's eyes,—that sin would be quite enough to shut me out of heaven. The gates would be shut against me for that one sin. No soul on which there is a speck of sin can ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... express object of Mr. Smithson's bequest is the diffusion of knowledge among men. IT IS KNOWLEDGE, the source of all human wisdom, and of all beneficent power; knowledge, as far transcending the postulated lever of Archimedes as the universe transcends this speck of earth upon its face; knowledge, the attribute of Omnipotence, of which man alone, in the physical and material ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... combed his hair, pulled up his stockings and tied his shoes neatly, buttoned his jacket closely over his shirt, and was just pinning up the rent in his hat, when Rags considerately brought another suggestion in the shape of an old chicken-wing, with which he brushed every speck of dust from his clothes. This done, and being no respecter of persons, he took the family comb to Rags, who woke the echoes during the operation, and hoped to the Lord that the squirrels would run slowly and that the field-mice would be ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Juan stood, bewilder'd on the deck: The wind sung, cordage strain'd, and sailors swore, And the ship creak'd, the town became a speck, From which away so fair and fast they bore. The best of remedies is a beef-steak Against sea-sickness: try it, sir, before You sneer, and I assure you this is true, For I have ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... her neck, Her bare arm showed its dimple, Her apron spread without a speck, Her air was frank ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... of von Herzmann was now a rapidly diminishing speck against the cloud bank toward la Chapelle, streaking for the Fatherland. The others, lacking a leader, and facing unequal chances with the timely and unexpected appearance of the French Spads, were withdrawing from the action ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... also exists by itself; or, more properly speaking, there exist living creatures, both plant and animal, which are so simple in structure, so low in organization, that they consist of nothing but a speck of protoplasm. Such a creature is the microscopic amoeba. Sometimes these little specks of protoplasm are surrounded with beautifully formed "silicious shells—a skeleton of radiating spiculae or crystal-clear concentric spheres of exquisite symmetry and beauty.[1]" ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... beyond his half circle of vision, behind him, on either hand, the forest of houses stretched away almost to infinity. The thought of it was as crushing as that of interstellar distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... daybreak. But he was making his ascent on the back flank of this particular mountain. He could not see Boulder Lake from there. On the other hand, no creature at Boulder Lake should be able to see him. Only an exploring party which might otherwise sight Jill would be apt to detect him, a slowly moving speck against ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... evening with which we have to do the beady eyes looked not in vain; for presently, far along the road, appeared a black speck like an insect crawling over ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... treatment, they had not yet come home to him. When, therefore, instead of being greeted with the boisterous acclamations of other spirits as bad as himself, he was ushered into a cell white as driven snow, and his duties explained to him, the heavy penalty he was under should a speck of dirt ever be discovered on the walls or floor, Thomas looked blank and had a misgiving. To his dismay he found that the silent cellular system was even carried out in the chapel, where each prisoner had a sort of sentry-box to himself, and that the hour's promenade ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... malaria, we should find in each of these examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand, and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he looked, his eyes rested upon a dark speck just beneath the overhanging fog. For a few minutes it made no impression upon his wandering mind. But slowly he began to realize that the object was in motion, and moving toward the steamer. Then he saw something dark being waved as if to attract attention. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... a ripple, except immediately in the ship's wake. The distant promontory, which he suspected to be the point whither he had been washed by the waves, after the explosion of the Halcyon, and which seemed the extremity of a small island, had now receded into an azure speck: the ship's course lay to the southward or south-east: and on the larboard quarter a long line of coast trended away to the south-west. A remarkable pile of rock on this coast attracted his attention, and rivetted his gaze as by some power of fascination. Who will refuse to sympathize ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... gallant style, With sails and streamers full and free! I watched her course for many a mile Far out upon the distant sea! At dusk she lessened to a speck, And then I could not trace her more! Sad hearts were beating on her deck, Sad hearts were beating ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... she was just like that when she'd heard that he was landed in England; she did nought but sit over the bent of the hill yonder, peering along the road to Botfield; and one evening at sundown she saw something, little more than a speck upon the turf, and she'd a feeling come over her that it was he, and she fainted for real joy. After all, we weren't much happier when we were settled down like. Grandfather had learned to tend sheep out yonder, and I worked at Botfield; but we never laid by money to build a brick house, ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... (225 feet long by 150) the only man Mrs. Chuff saw, was Tiggs. He was lying on a crimson-velvet sofa, reading a French novel of Paul de Kock. It was a very little book. He is a very little man. In that enormous hall he looked like a mere speck. As the ladies passed breathless and trembling in the vastness of the magnificent solitude, he threw a knowing, killing glance at the fair strangers, as much as to say, 'Ain't I a fine fellow?' They thought ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Clover seemed such a fragile support! There was no help for it. The thing was decided on, decided for the best, as they all hoped; but Dr. Carr was not at all happy in his mind as he watched the steamer become a gradually lessening speck in the distance, and he sighed heavily when at ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... wear male attire when they like, and it is graceful for them to do so, while Macaria is confined to her arm-chair behind the green curtain, and the Fair Saint could not bear a speck of dust on ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... three took counsel together and halted, and the scouts who were watching them report that they remained absolutely stationary for the next half hour. The Martian who had been overthrown crawled tediously out of his hood, a small brown figure, oddly suggestive from that distance of a speck of blight, and apparently engaged in the repair of his support. About nine he had finished, for his cowl was then seen above ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... fierce. The monarch of the sky busies itself with tender cares for its brood. Then, there is gentleness along with the terribleness. The strong beak and claw, the gaze that can see so far, and the mighty spread of wings that can lift it till it is an invisible speck in the blue vault, go along with the instinct of paternity: and the fledglings in the nest look up at the fierce beak and bright eyes, and know no terror. The impression of this blending of power and gentleness is greatly deepened, as it seems to me, if ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... finishing breakfast my eye was attracted to a snow speck on the mountainside some two thousand feet above us and slightly westward that somehow looked to me different from other snow specks. For nearly a minute I stared at it through my glasses. At last the speck moved. The ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... thee for a son of Adam and will fear thee and flee. He dreadeth none in the sea as he dreadeth a son of Adam; for that an he eateth a man he dieth forthright, because human fat is a deadly poison to this kind of creature; nor do we collect its liver-speck save by means of a man, when he falleth into the sea and is drowned; for that his semblance becometh changed and ofttimes his flesh is torn; so the Dandan eateth him, deeming him the same of the denizens of the deep, and dieth. Then we light upon our ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Blakely and I were resolved that he should never have that little talk he spoke of with so much confidence. Ideals are awfully in the way sometimes, but nobody with a speck of decency can bear to stand by and see them destroyed. Dad's deals had to be ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... was once riding over Salisbury Plain, when a boy, keeping sheep, called to him—"Sir, you had better make haste on, or you will get a wet jacket." Newton looking round and observing neither clouds nor speck on the horizon, jogged on, taking very little notice of the rustic's information. He had made but a few miles, when a storm suddenly arising, wetted him to the skin. Surprised at the circumstance, and determined, if possible, to ascertain how an ignorant boy had attained ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... the yards and booms, reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas, her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black speck. Before we doubled the point, we were going at a dashing rate, and leaving the shipping far astern. We had a fine breeze to take us through the Canal, as they call this bay of forty miles long by ten wide. The breeze died away at night, and we were becalmed all day on ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an opener space, studded with smaller islands,—mere hill-tops rising out of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the skeletons of perished hills, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... don' 'speck to eat whut's good fuh me! All I says is, 'Grub, keep me alive. Ef you do dat, you done a good ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... moved, and his eyes never turned from the little boat that went and left him there—the little boat that fast became merely a flash and speck of white against the azure air, no bigger than the breadth of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Minturn. "I've seen that kind before. I'll take care of it for you, and find out what it is worth," and he very carefully sealed the tiny speck in an envelope which he ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... out a high cool cloud descends An aeroplane's far moan; The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends, The black speck travels on. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... melancholy, had begun. At the end of the mighty vista of the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... trees, On indistinguishable wings Of storm, the wind of evening swings; Before its insane anger flees Distracted leaf and shattered bough: There is a rushing as when seas Of thunder beat an iron prow On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck: 'Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck Of flickering blackness, driven by, A mad bat ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... their way over higher ground. Still, as they walked along they could not help every now and then turning round to watch the receding ship. Gradually her hull disappeared, her courses sank beneath the horizon, the topsails followed, and then Willy alone could discern a small dark speck, which soon faded from view. He heaved a sigh. "I should like to have sent home news, at all events, that I was safe, and perhaps Charles and the girls may by this time have reached New Zealand. They will be very sorry when they hear that ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... Bork waited, staring upwards. Then Dave saw something in the sky. A speck appeared and came hurtling down. In seconds, it was the body of one of the men who had risen. Dave felt his stomach tighten and braced himself. There was no slowing as the body fell. It landed in the center of ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... death. The ear, from all assaults releas'd, As motion, sound, and life, had ceas'd. The beetle rarely murmur'd by, No sheep-dog sent his voice so high, Save when, by chance, far down the steep, Crept a live speck, a straggling sheep; Yet one lone object, plainly seen, Curv'd slowly, in a line of green, On the brown heath: no demon fell, No wizard foe, with magic spell, To chain the senses, chill the heart, No wizard guided POWEL'S cart; He of our nectar had the care, All our ambrosia rested ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... seemed to be moving under him, not from fear, but from impatience. What had been the red and gold paper of the cracker was now the scarlet and gold lace of his own cavalry uniform. He knocked a speck from his sleeve, and scanned the distant ridge, from which a thin line of smoke floated solemnly away, with keen, impatient eyes. Were they to stand inactive ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... scientist has hazarded the speculation that the origin of life on this planet has been the falling upon it of the fragments of a meteor, or an aerolite from some other system, with a speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever may be the case in regard to physical life, that is absolutely true in the case of spiritual life. It all originates because this heaven-descended ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... first floor. He was too weak to go upstairs by himself, and he and his friend therefore walked into the front room together. It was in complete order, although it was so early in the morning. Everything was dusted; even the lower fire-bar had not a speck of ashes on it, and on the hob already was a saucepan in which Mrs. Coleman proposed to cook the one o'clock dinner. On the walls were portraits of Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright, and the mezzotint engraving of Sadler's Bunyan. ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... story of her heart. She described her lover as he appeared to her in the early days of courtship, young, handsome, good, noble in sentiment, and warm and tender in manner. Halcyon days—not a speck to be seen on ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... been using a small but powerful telescope, uttered an exclamation, and focussed the instrument on a speck that seemed moving along on the ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... twenty-one consists of the terms for two tens and one. In this manner they count to ten tens, which is rau. Ten raus is one mano, or thousand; ten manos one million, and so on. How exactly the Algonquin method, but not a speck of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... We are amazed when we hear in answer the name of some quiet girl of whom we had never thought much, and we exclaim, "Why, I did not know she could do any thing! Where did she ever get the courage? I didn't know she had a speck of brains, or heart, or any kind ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... return—it was told to me by himself, some years afterwards, with gravity, and even sadness. "The last of my chargers," he said, "was a high-spirited and very handsome one, by name Daisy, all over white, without a speck, and with such a mane as Rubens delighted to paint. He had, among other good qualities, one always particularly valuable in my case, that of standing like a rock to be mounted. When he was brought to the door, after I came home from the Continent, instead of signifying, by the usual tokens, that ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... father's town of Clonbrony?" thought Lord Colambre. "Is this Ireland? No, it is not Ireland. Let me not, like most of those who forsake their native country, traduce it. Let me not, even to my own mind, commit the injustice of taking a speck for the whole. What I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest it is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority; but who, neglecting this duty, commit power to bad ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... accompanied us during the last two days was made up mostly of American and British destroyers, though there were two French boats among them. They made a lively scene, and surely gave us great protection. If a speck would appear on the horizon, two boats would be off to investigate it, and would return later to join the fleet. We were also accompanied on the last day of the voyage by two airplanes as a further ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... face and stooped over to flick an imaginary particle of dust from his trousers' leg. There was but one object in their going and he had not dreamed of being asked what it was. He could not be employed forever in brushing away that speck, and yet he could not, to save his life, construct an answer to Veath's question. In the midst of his despair a sudden resolution came, and he looked up, his ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... annihilated. Pelicans and geese and curlews were in uproar, as at a concerted signal. A buzzard yelped thrice like a dog, and rose in a long spiral from the cliff to Melicent's right hand. He hung motionless, a speck in the clear zenith, uncannily anticipative. Warmth flooded ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... heaven if he granted it, and yet not quite able to grant it. Far away though he stands to the left of the good host, he has yet something in common with that third person discernible on the right—that speck yonder, which I believe to be Lucullus. Nothing that we know of Lucullus suggests that he was less inhuman than the churl of Arden. It does not appear that he had a single friend, nor that he wished for ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... were photographs about, a gay label on the whisky-bottle, and other signs of an advanced civilization; but outside nothing but the wild precipices of the coast, a surging sea that seemed almost to surround the place, the wild screaming of the sea-birds, and a single ship appearing like a mere speck on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... & Company, London, began on their own account to manufacture sensitive photographic plates by machinery, and the operations are exceedingly delicate, for a single minute air bubble or speck of dust on a plate may mar the perfection of a picture. Their works for the purpose at Southgate were erected in the summer of 1886, and were designed throughout ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... she walked in complete darkness and in silence, save the gurgling of another stream, hid from sight the shadowy semblance of houses and barns and sheds. Their disappearance slumped her spirits again, for without them she was no more than a solitary speck in the vast loneliness. Their actual nearness could not comfort her. She was seized with a reasonless, panicky fear that by the time she crossed the stream and climbed the hill beyond they would no longer be there where she ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... man's untrained eyes had failed to note that which would have first attracted the attention of one schooled in the land that lay about him. He had not seen a tiny moving speck on the road over which he had passed. A horseman ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... growing in bunches or grapes like the currant, on a bush very similar to the currant bush: the leaves of this shrub resemble those of the laurel: they are very thick and always green. The fruit is oblong, and disposed in two rows on the stem: the extremity of the berry is open, having a little speck or tuft like that of an apple. It is not of a particularly fine flavor, but it is wholesome, and one may eat a quantity of it, without inconvenience. The natives make great use of it; they prepare it for the winter by bruising ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... gentlemen to the office entrance and began to complain: "Ah! doctor, if you only knew what trouble I have even to get those girls to wash their hands! We who are so clean! who put all our pride in keeping the house clean. If ever a speck of dust is seen anywhere it is certainly not ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... warned against the big puma. He had too just an appreciation of Hansen's judgment, however, to quite disregard the warning, and he turned it over curiously in his mind as he went to his dressing-room. Emerging a few minutes later in the black-and-white of faultless evening dress, without a speck on his varnished shoes, he moved down along the front of the cages, addressing to the occupant of each, as he passed, a sharp, authoritative word which ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... last sail showed a white speck in the distance, Patricia and Betty came out upon the porch and sat them down, one on either side of the Governor, with whom they were great favorites. Colonel Ludlow and Captain Laramore were at dice at a table within the hall, and Colonel Verney had excused himself in ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... in the face. It was like seeing suddenly at close quarters some great bright monument that one has long known only as a sun-caught speck in the distance. He saw the large violet eyes open to him, and their lashes curling to him; the vivid parted lips; and the black ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... tinted plaster; where they met the floor the corners were all carefully rounded off so that no dust could gather in cracks and crevices; the floor, too, was of smooth cement; there was no spot in which a speck of dust could settle in improper peace. A series of benches ran round the room, and gave harbourings to a collection of scientific instruments of strange appearance and shape; two large tables, one at either end of the room, were similarly equipped. ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... to bite me," urged Tubby, holding up one finger of his right hand, and on which a tiny speck of blood was visible. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... Turner's Shipyard opened out, Charley edged into it to get the smoother water. Benicia was in view, and we were bowling along over comparatively easy water, when a speck of a boat danced up ahead of us, directly in our course. It was low-water slack. Charley and I looked at each other. No word was spoken, but at once the yacht began a most astonishing performance, veering and yawing ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... much farther. We'll go on and on till this earth dries up, and then we'll move to another, or build one—I can't tell which—and all the time we're moving round something, but I don't know what or why. I only know it's been going on forever—this life thing—and we're a little speck in the current, and it will ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... for the other boat. No sign of any living thing could be discovered as we peered up the rapid, which from below had the appearance of an almost vertical fall. Presently at the top of the foam a white speck moved, clearly seen against the dark background. It was the Canonita on the edge of the fall. I can see her yet, pausing for an instant, apparently, and then disappearing completely amidst the plunging waters. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... mountains; on the west spreads the Ionian, on the south and east the Aegean Sea. Its greatest length is two hundred and twenty geographical miles; its greatest width one hundred and forty. No contrast can be more startling than the speck of earth which Greece occupies in the map of the world, compared to the space claimed by the Grecian influences in the history of the human mind. In that contrast itself is the moral which Greece has left us—nor can volumes more emphatically ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or speckled trout of the United States, except that the specks of the former are of a deep black, while those of the latter are of a red or gold colour: they have long sharp teeth on the palate and tongue, and generally a small speck of red on each side behind the front ventral fins; the flesh is of a pale yellowish red, or when in good order of a ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... off slumber, the rocks will have again closed over the chasm not to be re-opened by me, nor perhaps by others, for ages yet unguessed. Think of me sometimes, and with kindness. When I reach the life that lies beyond this speck in time, I shall look round for thee. Even there, the world consigned to thyself and thy people may have rocks and gulfs which divide it from that in which I rejoin those of my race that have gone before, and I may be powerless to cleave ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... I 'members, an' dat wuz jist a middlin' one. De massa told me ter pick de cotton an' I sot down in de middle an' didn't wuck a speck. De oberseer come an' he frailed me wid a cotton-stalk; he wuz a heap meaner ter de niggers dan Massa Dick wuz. I saw some niggers what wuz beat bad, but I ain't neber ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... lugger drifted — a little white speck: Joe Nagasaki, the 'tender', holding the life-line on deck, Talked through the rope to the diver, knew when to drift or ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... not stay long in that hot place, and I did not take a pick and happen to strike upon a nugget, as it is said the Duke of Edinburgh did, though I saw a small dish of the dirt washed when we reached the top, and it yielded a speck or two. We saw "the colour," as the expression is. I felt quite relieved at last to find myself at the top of the shaft, and in the coolness and freshness of the open air. Here the dirt raised from the mine is put into the ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... smaller English dirigible pattern," Fernald announced, still studying the distant speck in the sky, which, of course, looked much larger in the field of his glass. "Yes, it's ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... field-glass and directed it at a little speck high above our heads. It was the basket floating high in the air. I gave the glass to my wife to look, but she did not want to ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... oaks of Bashan.' The same prophet says, in the tenth chapter and nineteenth verse, 'And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them.' These words have been particularly applied to the stately cedars of Lebanon, for 'the once magnificent grove is but a speck on the mountain-side. Many persons have taken it in the distance for a wood of fir trees, but on approaching nearer and taking a closer view the cedars resume somewhat of their ancient majesty. The space they cover is not more than half a mile, but, once amidst them, the beautiful fan-like ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... clear field for madam, the cooper's wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills, where the sky still wore the orange ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... city. Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense piles of scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflecting the Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speck of life. A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still, motionless—save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the vertical wall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all the fury too of a crashing ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Master transfigured, his raiment white and glistening, and his face like the light, so are there hours when our whole mortal life stands forth in a celestial radiance. From our daily lot falls off every weed of care,—from our heart-friends every speck and stain of earthly infirmity. Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst, and gold touch every object. Absent friends and friends gone on the last long journey stand once more together, bright with an immortal glow, and, like the disciples who saw their Master ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... We see great masses of something that science has called "matter." We see in operation a wonderful something called "force" or "energy" in its countless forms of manifestations. We see things that we call "forms of life," varying in manifestation from the tiny speck of slime that we call the Moneron, up to that form ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... rotated uniformly by clockwork, a tuning-fork armed with a metallic style being so adjusted that it makes a clear fine line on the smoked paper. The tuning-fork is placed in the secondary circuit of an induction coil, so that when the primary circuit is broken an induced spark removes a speck of black from the paper and leaves a mark. The time period is deduced by counting the number of vibrations and fractions of vibration of the tuning-fork as recorded by a sinuous line on the cylinder. In later forms of this instrument ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Inchcape bell was seen, A darker speck on the ocean green; Sir Ralph the Rover walk'd his deck, And he fix'd his eye on ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival. When on the hill behind the port, whence a view of the open Channel could be obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking the eternally level waste of waters southward, was the truck of the Joana's mainmast. Or when indoors, a shout or excitement of any kind at the corner of the Town Cellar, where the High Street joined ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... a wrong direction. He can then flatter himself that he is riding wide and making a line for himself. But to be entrapped into a field without any power of getting out of it; to see the red backs of the forward men becoming smaller and smaller in the distance, till the last speck disappears over some hedge; to see the fence before you and know that it is too much for you; to ride round and round in an agony of despair which is by no means mute, and at last to give sixpence to some boy to conduct you back into the road; that is wretched: that is real unhappiness. I am, therefore, ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... embers; the yellow hearts of the daisies were quite lost, merged into their shining white petals. And, striking against the windows of the old black and white checkered farm (a ghastly skeleton in this light), it made them not flare, nay, not redden in the faintest degree, but reflect a brilliant speck of white light. Everything was unsubstantial, yet not as in a mist, nay, rather substantial, but flat, as if cut out of paper and pasted on the black branches and green leaves, the livid, glaring houses, with roofs of dead, scarce ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that the translations here offered by Dr. Haug are final. We hope, on the contrary, that he will go on with the work he has so well begun, and that he will not rest till he has removed every dark speck that still covers the image of Zoroaster's primitive faith. Many of the passages as translated by him are as clear as daylight, and carry conviction by their very clearness. Others, however, are obscure, hazy, meaningless. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... pointing finger. She could distinguish a woman's moving figure, a mere speck on the road ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... great Tribune of the world is dead! Join in our grief, and let our tears be shed Without reserve or coldness on his bier; Look on his life as on a map outspread— His fight for freedom—freedom far and near— And if a speck should rise, oh! hide ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... fearful, so breathless, so searching as the night silence of a wild country buried five feet deep in snow. For thirty miles or so, north, south, east, and west of the small, half-smothered speck of gold in Pierre Landis's cabin window, there lay, on a certain December night, this silence, bathed in moonlight. The cold was intense: below the bench where Pierre's homestead lay, there rose from the twisted, rapid river, a cloud of steam, above which ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Goose will do the Incognitans all the good in the galaxy, it will take their minds off controversies over interhemispherical trade and put them on to the quest of the Unobtainable; they will get to know something of the Universe outside their own little speck. Mr. Yardo has seen a good deal of the Universe in the course of advising on how to recondition space-packed meat and he ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... the cupboard, and the rocking-chair in which Mrs. Brady sat, and leave anything but a tortuous path for locomotion. The boys knew the track, however, and seldom ran up against anything with sufficient force to disturb it or their own serenity. But there was not a speck of dust ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... moment, watching with fascinated eyes the speck of scarlet that still trembled in the sunshine. It fluttered from sight at last, and ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... the old man, "chilluns can't speck ter know all 'bout eve'ything. And bless grashus, honey! some er der doin's er Brer Fox 'bout dis yer time ain't fit fer chilluns ter know. Brer Fox, I'm feared, wuz kinder simpertin' roun' atter udder people's prop'ty, and dat's des why he lay ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... in the butterfly's wing will be in the full-grown insect a great blemish. The speck in thy child's nature, if fondly overlooked now, will become a wide rent traversing all ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the gloom moved a dark speck. It couldn't be Father, for he had gone in the machine—the nice, comfortable little car that Stephen had made them get before he went away to college, because he said that Father needed to have things easier now. Father would be in the machine, and by this time the lights would be lit. Father ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... her at a short distance to the rear. Her head was bowed a little, and she moved slowly, she being weak and her irons heavy. She had on men's attire—all black; a soft woolen stuff, intensely black, funereally black, not a speck of relieving color in it from her throat to the floor. A wide collar of this same black stuff lay in radiating folds upon her shoulders and breast; the sleeves of her doublet were full, down to the elbows, and tight thence to ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... ocean, from the central speck on which he stood to the vast, vanishing circle of the horizon, seemed one boundless, boiling caldron. Millions of waves were simultaneously leaping in thunder from the abyss and rearing themselves into blue mountain ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... excitement grew in her pulse by pulse, as the excitement grows in a man waiting for a friend at a station; he sees first the faint smoke like a cloud on the skyline, and then a black speck beneath the smoke, and next the engine draws up on him with a humming of the rails which grows ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... light striking on his eyeball, seems paralysed by terror. The shepherds have only just awakened. The Nativity: Darkness. A vague crowd of country folk jostling each other noiselessly. A lantern, a white speck in the centre, sheds a smoky, uncertain light on the corner where the Child sleeps upon the pillows, the Virgin, wearied, resting by its side, her face on her hand. Joseph is seated by, only his head visible above his book. The cows are just visible in the gloom. ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... stretched his arms upwards and his hands were immediately filled with the fruit. At another time this magician left his overcoat by mistake in a railway carriage, and only remembered it when the train was a mere speck upon the horizon; but, on the utterance of certain words, the coat immediately flew through the air back ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... upon a ray of light, and glide rapidly to the portals of our Universe. Soon we perceive a tiny speck, scintillating feebly in the depths of Space, and recognize it as our own celestial quarters. This little star shines like the head of a gold pin, and increases in size as we advance toward it. We traverse ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... looked up in great alarm at my cheek—but seeing that it was not bleeding, and had no hole in it, she patted it softly with her little tender dimpled hand, and said: "Aunt Fanny, Aunt Fanny," in a little speck of a whisper to herself a great ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... hear in answer the name of some quiet girl of whom we had never thought much, and we exclaim, "Why, I did not know she could do any thing! Where did she ever get the courage? I didn't know she had a speck of brains, or heart, or any kind of ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... follow the example of Joe, the Italian who puts out our ashes," laughed Evelyn. "Just grin when they try to argue and shrug our shoulders. 'Me no speck Ang-lish.'" ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... located. A serious discussion was held on the train about going to the front and the dangers were depicted quite vividly. We stopped at Chagny, after passing a very old church dating back to the Tenth century. We saw, as we passed along, droves of beautiful white cows, with not a speck of color. ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... to save time by attempting to weld dirty or wet lead surfaces, because time cannot be saved by doing so, and you run the risk of being injured if hot lead is thrown into your face. Remove absolutely every speck of dirt—you will soon learn that it is the only way to do a ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... bill, Farncombe. And yet, a very few years back— she won't dispute it— I was one of the smartest chaps going, good at my job, with prospects as rosy as any man's in my regiment. There wasn't a cloud the size of your hand, apparently, in my particular bit of sky at the time I speak of; not a speck! Then I met this young lady, and— [pointing to the box-ottoman] well, since we're ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... do in a short while, but meanwhile he enjoyed the sensation of being on a tiny world in space with only a handful of Planeteers for company. He smiled. "King Foster," he said to himself. "Monarch of a thorium space speck." It was a rather nice feeling, even though he laughed at himself for thinking it. Since he was in command of the detachment, he could in all truth say that this was his own personal planet. It would ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... radiance to adorn the firmament of that magnificent world. He can wing his flight through the still more distant regions of the universe, leaving the sun and all his planets behind him, till they appear like a scarcely discernible speck in creation, and contemplate thousands and millions of stars and starry systems beyond the range of the unassisted eye, and wander among the suns and worlds dispersed throughout the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... composition, on which they had previously taken the impression of the seal. England shows no dispositions to enter into friendly connections with us. On the contrary, her detention of our posts, seems to be the speck which is to produce a storm. I judge that a war with America would be a popular war in England. Perhaps the situation of Ireland may deter the ministry from hastening it on. Peace is at length made between the Emperor and Dutch. The terms are not published, but it is said he gets ten ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... distance a moving speck on the water caught his eye. For a few minutes he watched it in suspense, then ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... sun was low, though it was possible, as Raoul perceived, to detect the speck that was still swinging at the Minerva's fore-yard-arm; a circumstance to which the young man, with considerate feeling, refrained from adverting. The Proserpine had been some time in motion, standing out of the fleet under a cloud of canvas, but with an air so light as to permit ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have been more precise or perfect than the outward man, which his honor exhibited to the gaze of his constituents. Neatly-fitting boots, square toed, and of the most elaborate manufacture, encased his feet. Not a speck defiled their high polish; the very dust and mud which introduces itself cosily into the habiliments of your common, warm hearted men, seemed to shrink away chilled and repulsed by the immaculate coldness that clung like an atmosphere around the Mayor of New York. The nap of his ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... thought of our earth as the centre of the universe, it was not difficult to believe that its inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator. But astronomy has changed all that; and what once we thought so great, we know now to be but a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The old question challenges us with a force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... wigwams, which are about the size and shape of an open umbrella resting on its edge. The night was dark throughout the forest, and overhead; the little circle of light within which I stood, seemed like a magician's ring, sacred and safe from evil spirits that filled the air around. It was as the speck of Time amid the ocean of Eternity — as Hope, bright and solitary in the midst of unfathomable darkness. There I felt safe and secure — but without — who might tell what spirits roamed abroad, melancholy and malignant? Peering into that dark boundary ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... next stage. Poor fool, he might rub every particle of moisture off the skin of his body—he might be clean as a kitten—but he could not and did not purify his mind with all this friction; and the man who would have fainted to see a black speck upon his shirt, was not at all shocked at the indecent conversation in which he and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... made up her mind to the self-immolation, she proceeded to consider how best she should adorn herself for the sacrifice. Others have done so in sadder seriousness. Doubtless, Curtius rode at his last leap without a speck on his burnished mail: purple, and gold, and gems flamed all round Sardanapalus when he fired the holocaust in Nineveh: even that miserable, dastardly Nero was solicitous about the marble fragments that were to line his felon's grave. So it befell that, on this particular ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... them were at breakfast, Terrence O'Connor rushed into the hut with the news that a ship was in sight! Instantly the boat was manned, and they rowed with all their might towards the vessel, which was seen like a white speck on the horizon. They rowed to within four miles of her, with an oar set up as a mast, and a jacket attached thereto as a flag, but a breeze sprang up, and the strange sail actually passed on without taking the slightest notice of them—though ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... tiny bird, A shining speck at sleepy dawn, Forgets the ant-hill so absurd, This self-important Buffalo. Descending twenty miles away He bathes his wings at ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... it craved. A number of gentlemen listened to my charge, and as the little group left the office one of them inquired where I was from. With my reply I gave them my papers from the governor and members of Congress of Michigan. After reading they introduced themselves,—Dr. Wood, Dr. Speck, Lawyer James, and others. Dr. Speck informed me of a family whose youngest child actually starved to death three days before. He was called when it was dying, but too late to save it. He said, "There were ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... universal chaos, no more than a speck of helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature's inexplicable machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of which his heart was sure—behind and above all this was God, who held all these things in His hand. And over there ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the party clambered over and threaded their way amid this debris until the tiny but cheering lights of Temple Camp were visible far down across the lake. There the two arriving troops were about finishing their hot stew! Far down and nearer than the camp was a moving speck of light; some one was on the lake. The boys did not venture ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a speck was seen in the horizon; now it is visible above the hollow wave, now curtained from our sight by the swelling billow: we approach nearer; the speck divides, and two spots appear; they ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... Helen could bear. Blinded by tears she stood kissing her hand to the familiar figure now only faintly discernible on the fast receding steamship, and she stood there long after every one else had left the dock watching until the Mauretania was only a speck in ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... shuddered at the chances which his young companion took upon some perilously slender limb. Once, the impulse seized him to call a warning, but he refrained from a kind of inspired confidence in that young dare-devil who by now seemed a mere speck of brown moving in and out of the darkened green above him. Once he was on the point of shouting advice to Hervey about what to do in the unlikely event of his reaching the nest before the eagle, or in the more serious contingency of an ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Speck von Sternberg was the German Ambassador to Washington. He was in Paris. I went there to see him and ascertain, if I could, why my exequatur was withheld. The Government at Washington could get no information on the subject. ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... has been half blind through prejudice either for or against; he either sees her magnified with adulation, or else the large end of the glass is placed against his eye and she is merely a speck in the distance. But let a woman step past that mysterious wall which separates the formal from the intimate—only one step—at once she is surrounded by the eyes of a man as if by a thousand spies. So ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... Island had been sighted from aloft. This news sent a thrill of joy into the hearts of all on board, for Spark Island lay ten leagues off the coast of Kalorama. Every eye was now fixed in the direction indicated, and many were the glasses brought into use. After various scannings, what seemed a mere speck on the horizon was pronounced by the commander to be nothing less than the famous Spark Island, a bit of land quite resembling the steeple of one of our fashionable churches, and which nature, in one of her strange freaks had ejected from the bottom of the sea, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... of the South African War, they and I held shooting matches together. The best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot there was Stewart Edward White. Among the many other good men was a stanch friend, Baron Speck von Sternberg, afterwards German Ambassador at Washington during my Presidency. He was a capital shot, rider, and walker, a devoted and most efficient servant of Germany, who had fought with distinction in the Franco-German ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... almost written sagacious, state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge-tank, upper tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum, main-return (as a liquid), and bilge-tank once more is the ordained cycle. Fleury's Ray sees to that; and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury's Ray. If a speck of oil, if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals, Fleury's Ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half a day's work for all hands and an expense of, one ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... 'likest his work.' That work was to defend the sheep from the wolves, and one mode of defence was by laying a strange trap for the enemy. The dog was remarkably like a sheep, his hair white without a dark speck, and he carried a great load of it, long and fleecy like wool. In the Hungarian steppes four or five of those dogs would lay themselves down on the grass in the evening, sleeping there like so many harmless lambs, with their faces inward for the heat of each other's breath. The keen eye ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... just to pass lightly over the surface; the rims and legs of tables, and the backs and legs of chairs and sofas, should be rubbed vigorously daily; if there is a book-case, every corner of every pane and ledge requires to be carefully wiped, so that not a speck of dust can ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... a little while ago—and no hand but his can raise the chains that support it; for he only knows the secret of their machinery. He has left the place for the night. He lives three miles and a half away, at a little village yonder, which looks only a black speck in the distance, and he will not return till some time ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... must dust the China Cat," said her sister Angelina. "She is so white that the least speck shows on her. Real white cats are very fussy about keeping themselves clean, so I do not see why a white China Cat should not be treated the same way. You dust the Nodding Donkey, Geraldine, and ...
— The Story of a Nodding Donkey • Laura Lee Hope
... broad and bright in a firmament of that most brilliant and transparent blue, which I have witnessed in no other country than America, so pure, so cloudless, so immeasurably distant as it seems from the beholder's eye! There was not a speck of cloud from east to west, from zenith to horizon; not a fleece of vapor on the mountain sides; not a breath of air to ruffle the calm basin of the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Isaac Newton was once riding over Salisbury Plain, when a boy, keeping sheep, called to him—"Sir, you had better make haste on, or you will get a wet jacket." Newton looking round and observing neither clouds nor speck on the horizon, jogged on, taking very little notice of the rustic's information. He had made but a few miles, when a storm suddenly arising, wetted him to the skin. Surprised at the circumstance, and determined, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... more he moved about, and clomb Ev'n to the highest he could climb, and saw, Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... my heart! as white sails shiver, And crowds are passing, and banks stretch wide; How hard to follow with lips that quiver, That moving speck on the far-off side! Farther, farther—I see it—I know it— My eyes brim over, it melts away, Only my heart, to my heart shall show it, As I walk desolate ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... here, and let him graze, while I go over to that camp"—indicating a white speck between the trees—"and then I may inquire if any one has seen a girl like Tavia pass ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... falling down again; just a thought of its parent beryl green hovers round the edges; and it grows more lucent and sweet to the centre, and there you lose yourself in some dream of vast seas, a glory of unimagined oceans; and you say that it was crystallized to any slow flute-like tune, each speck of it floating into file with a musical grace, and carrying its sound with it. There! it's very fanciful, but I'm always feeling the tune in aqua-marina, and trying to find it,—but I shouldn't know it was a tune, if I did, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... one is caused thereby to decry one's state of mortality, which seems as inseparable from selfish ends as the red wings of a rose from the thorny stem which binds it to earth. Truly the longer I live the more am I aware of the speck which mars the completeness of all in this world, and ever the desire for a better, and that longing which will not be appeased groweth in my soul, until methinks the very keenness of the ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day as this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the east for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill is furrowed by a deep trench—a "bowel," rather—winding invisibly from one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand two or three artillery ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... rough and crested with mimic waves, and they felt not disposed to launch the raft on so stormy a surface, but they stood looking out over the lake and admiring the changing foliage, when Hector pointed out to his cousin a dark speck dancing on the waters, between the two nearest islands. The wind, which blew very strong still from the north-east, brought the object nearer every minute. At first they thought it might be a pine-branch that ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... the blue above me, A tiny speck in the sky, Rained down from its bosom's fulness A shower of melody, Dropping through the golden sunlight, ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... motion, undistinguish'd quite, Save when she wheels direct from shade to light: The flutt'ring songstress a mere speck became, Like fancy's floating bubbles in a dream; He sees her yet, but yielding to repose, Unwittingly his jaded eyelids close. Delicious sleep! From sleep who could forbear, With no more guilt than Giles, and no more care? Peace o'er ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... earnestness with which she pitied him. No struggle of his failed but that she shouldered and bore the failure with him, cheering him when he felt like lagging, smiling when he despaired the deepest. Between them a speck of joy grew larger, brighter each day despite the gloom that surrounded it. Their child was their one possession of worth, 4- year-old Helen—sunny-faced Helen—Helen who suffered none of the pangs because of the sacrifices made by those whose ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... these would-be murderers to know how their trick failed. That's the reason I didn't pound the brute to a jelly on the bed, for it would have made such a mess on the sheet. Now there isn't a speck on it. I'll take the vase with me into my room and finish the cobra off. In the morning I'll get rid of its body somehow. When these devils find tomorrow that you're not dead, they'll be very puzzled. Now, the question is, what are you ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... if they had a pardonable fashion of congealing under the stress of the Canadian winter, they generally showed signs of a thaw at the approach of spring. At the present moment he had no thought, no eyes, for anything save a mist-enshrouded speck far off across the waters of Lake Ontario. All the impatience and longing of the week just past found vent through his eyes, as he watched that pale, uncertain, scarcely visible mote on the horizon. As he reached the shore the fog lifted a little, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... nut brown musk, e'er claims the highest price * Whilst for a load of whitest lime none more than dirham bids? And while white speck upon the eye deforms the loveliest youth, * Black eyes discharge the sharpest shafts ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... comes from the injector consists of such minute drops of the liquid and is so thoroughly mixed with oxygen that when it burns the combustion is complete, and only steam and carbonic acid gas go out of the top of the kiln. Not a speck of soot comes from the kiln or the smokestack or soils the whitewashed purity of the boiler room. Oil fuel is absolutely clean. It is labor saving, too. No fireman has to keep shoveling coal, there are no ashes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... do you know what a speck means?" demanded Mrs. Caldwell, with no chance in the troubled expression ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... sight, and indeed, at first it is so little that you cannot see it, but by the motion of it; for at every pulse, as it opens you may see it, and immediately again it shuts, in such sort as it is not to be discerned. From this red speck, after a while, there will stream out a number of little (almost imperceptible) red veins. At the end of some of which, in time, there will be gathered together a knot of matter, which by little and little will take the form ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... shore, apparently touching some drooping boughs. Then his heart sank again, for he told himself that it was only fancy; and he shivered again as he felt how utterly exhausted Pete must be. Every moment he felt sure that he would see that little, dark speck disappear, but still it was there; and at last the watcher's heart began to throb, for the boat must have caught against those ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... taper at the chickens. "De ole coach hit uz th'owed away in de out'ouse, en I 'uz des stiddyin' 'bout splittin' it up fer kindlin' wood—en de new car'ige hit cos' mos' a mint er money. Ole Miss she uz dat sot up dat she ain' let de hosses git no sleep—nor me nurr. Ef'n she spy out a speck er dus' on dem ar wheels, somebody gwine year f'om it, sho's you bo'n—en dat somebody wuz me. Yes, Lawd, Ole Miss she 'low dat dey ain' never been nuttin' like dat ar car'ige in Varginny sence ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... soon as his head appeared above the water, and he began to swim as tranquilly as if he had been bathing in the lake of the old castle. Happily the moon was rising. Yvon saw, at a little distance, a black speck among the silvery waves—it was land. He approached it, not without difficulty, and finally succeeded in gaining a foothold. Dripping wet, exhausted with fatigue, and out of breath, he dragged himself on the sand, then, without more anxiety, said ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... a very large place, so large that our own country looks only like a tiny speck upon it, and an express train would take nearly a month to travel round it. Yet even our whole globe is nothing in size compared to the sun, for it only measures 8000 miles across, while the ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... The little speck of life he placed on a wisp of hay before the small stove, where a can of milk was simmering. Oak extinguished the lantern by blowing into it and then pinching the snuff, the cot being lighted by a candle suspended by a twisted wire. A rather hard couch, formed ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like employment of cultivating flowers, and—with her recluse habits, and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe among the fraternity of beans ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... long chase we had no chance whatever with a canoe which held nearly a hundred warriors. Nevertheless, we resolved to do our utmost to escape, and paddled with a degree of vigour that kept us well in advance of our pursuers. The war-canoe was so far behind us that it seemed but a little speck on the sea, and the shouts, to which the crew occasionally gave vent, came faintly towards us on the morning breeze. We therefore hoped that we should be able to keep in advance for an hour or two, when we might perhaps reach the land ahead. But this hope was suddenly crushed by the supposed ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... a bit ashamed, not one speck regretful. Merely, he was sweet-hungry. And now that the sugar was gone, he wanted one of those apples mightily. Finally she gave him one, and then the other, feeding them to him rapidly, but not more rapidly than he wanted them. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... no word, but saluted deliberately, and watched his brother's boat recede, till it was a speck upon the sea, as it moved towards ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of this fourteen years' experience as a public advocate of the cause of my enslaved brothers and sisters? The time is but as a speck, yet large enough to justify a pause for retrospection—and a pause it must ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Bon Ami and I clean this mirror. A damp cloth and a little Bon Ami are all one needs. When the Bon Ami film has dried—a few brisk rubs with a dry cloth and presto! every speck of dust and ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... haven't one speck of feeling for that blessed darling, you naughty boy! To talk of such a thing in such a way with not a tear on your face! And to think of him laying there a helpless cripple, and him the owner of the biggest ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... Betty," said Wetzel as he stepped to the mark. He fastened his keen eyes on the stake. At that distance the head of the nail looked like a tiny black speck. Wetzel took one of the locks of hair that waved over his broad shoulders and held it up in front of his eyes a moment. He thus ascertained that there was not any perceptible breeze. The long black barrel started slowly to rise—it seemed to the interested ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... hungrily, and when in the direction of Sixty Mile a dark speck appeared for a moment against the white background of an ice- jam, he cast an anxious eye at the sun. It had climbed nearly to the zenith. Now and again he caught the black speck clearing the hills of ice and sinking into the intervening hollows; ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards—Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... quietly on with my work, but when the stream threatened a group of stanchions, so highly polished that I could not endure the notion of a speck on their brightness, I lifted them out of harm's way, and with the clatter of this movement drew the attention of the plier of ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... positive prohibition—no, the thing was impossible! I saw plainly that a good, old-fashioned squirt of tobacco-juice would ruin such a country as this, where every room in every house was inimical to the habit, and every speck of ground throughout the length and breadth of the land adapted to some useful or ornamental purpose. Why, sir, I assure you that in the little duchy of Nassau—where it is said the grand-duke is unable to exercise his soldiers at target-shooting ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... deck on this bright morning, the island of Nepenthe resembled a cloud. It was a silvery speck upon that limitless expanse of blue sea and sky. A south wind breathed over the Mediterranean waters, drawing up their moisture which lay couched in thick mists abut its flanks and uplands. The comely outlines were barely suggested through ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... for the harbour where the "Lady Alice" lay, she kept round the island to another on the other side. What she was, or why she had come to the island, I could not conjecture, I was about to return when I caught sight of a speck of white canvas above the horizon. "That probably is the 'Eagle,'" I thought. "In a few days I shall have to bid my kind friends farewell and go back to my duties ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... "like a snail in a dream" whenever she fetched me to carry her things on these short expeditions, she would leave me in the hotel to mend her clothes; whereupon I became actually servile in my ministrations. I brushed a microscopic speck of dust off her gown; I pushed in a hairpin; I tucked up a flying end of veil; I straightened her toque, and made myself altogether indispensable; for the bare idea of being left behind was a box on the ear. I could not endure such a punishment—and the front seat ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... as briefly as possible what happened after I was left behind in that horrible place. By the light of the moon I saw them go—from the ridge I saw them put out to sea. I watched them until the boat was a mere speck on the luminous waters, and finally vanished from sight. I was left alone, a desperately wounded man, on an arid sulphurous island, without food ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... order some, and they come to the table, they are little bits of things, not bigger than a radish? Do you expect to get to heaven on such small potatoes, when you use big ones for a sign?" asked the boy, as he took out a silk handkerchief and brushed a speck of dust off his ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... it is not all the same. There are great rivers which you cannot cross by swimming; mountains you cannot climb; forests you cannot penetrate—dark, and inhabited by dangerous beasts, and so vast that all this space your eyes look on is a mere speck of earth ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Grandpapa, I will," declared Joel eagerly, and hopping up and down; "I'll do every single speck of the work. Now do let us hurry ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... 23rd ult., that I found a picture of Mrs. Newcome and Charles too, and of both their spectacles, quite like. I put it away, but some rogue, I suppose, has stolen it. He has done me and Hannah too. Mr. Speck, the artist, laughed and took it home, and says he is ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on the strand, became a speck in the distance and then disappeared from his view. The heart of the husband overflowed with bitterness, and he turned from the taffrail where he had been standing and walked ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... or two. Beyond was inky darkness. If only a speck of light were down below! Why did I shut the door? Go on I could not. I turned my face upward, where the friendly light, packing up its robes of every hue for the journey of a night, looked kindly in. And so I went ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... can be sure he didn't take his shoes with, him." Hazard rolled over on his back and lazily regarded the speck of flag fluttering briskly on the sheer edge of the precipice. "Say!" He sat up ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... "matter." We see in operation a wonderful something called "force" or "energy" in its countless forms of manifestations. We see things that we call "forms of life," varying in manifestation from the tiny speck of slime that we call the Moneron, up to that form ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... late—that night as the moon swept from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he drew himself ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... foreber!" shouted the negro; "I neber 'speck to see dat sight, while I not'ing but ole brack Bingo! I can lib to de end ob my days wid joy at de sight ob dat! it am next to finding poor Phillis hersef. Pray, missy, did you find dat in some accidental cotton bag? or am Bosting only the Christian name for wicked old Kintuck? I shouldn't ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... Lydia set sail. It pained us to see the vessel taken out of port by Carver Kinlay; but when she had rounded the Ness, Jessie and I went up to the head of the cliffs and watched the white sails over the sea, until they became a mere speck on the far horizon. Then, as we were coming back, and I remarked the tears in Jessie's eyes, I learned what I had already partly guessed—that Captain Gordon had asked my sister to ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... bet you sixpence she "finds herself" (I know nobody finds old maids). There now, didn't I tell you so? See,—she moves a little table up to the window and holds the table-cloth close up to her eye-lashes, to see if there's a speck of dirt on it, and then twitches, and pats, and pulls it into line and plummet order; then she places thereon a small tea tray, with only one cup and saucer. I declare it makes me feel quite melancholy! Then she throws up the window, lifts the cover off the tin-pail, and turns about a thimble ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... it is all daddy's on this side of the river down to where you see the white railings a long way down near the poplars, and that is the road we go to tea with Aunt Eleanour; and do you see a little blue speck on the hill over there? You could see if you had a telescope. Daddy showed me once; but you must shut your eye. That is Quarley Beacon, where ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... my attempt to get away. I carted out my feed and saddles, and when all was ready I sat on the pier and watched the burnished water of the bay for the dim speck which a steamer makes in rounding the distant island. At last the cry arose, "A steamer from the north!" I hurried for Ladrone, and as I passed with the horse the citizens smiled incredulously and asked, "Goin' to take the horse with ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... me intense pleasure. Especially did my heart leap when I took the Countess to the window a little to the right, and, pointing with one hand upwards, put the Count's binocular into her hands. The sun of the mid-noon was shining on a black speck floating from the topmost cliff of the Piz Langrev. As she looked she flung out her hand to me, still continuing to gaze with the glass held in the other. She saw her own scarlet favour flying from the pine-branch. That cry of wonder ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... knows its own mind sufficiently well, and has enough faith in its own powers of achievement. When these two requisites are wanting, the strongest giant cannot lift a two-ounce weight; when they are given, a bullock can take an eyelash out of its eye with its hind-foot, or a minute jelly speck can build itself a house out of various materials which it will select according to its purpose with the nicest care, though it have neither brain to think with, nor eyes to see with, nor hands nor feet to work with, nor is it anything but a minute speck of jelly—faith ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... constantly from midnight until seven in the morning, printing the daily edition. The rooms and machinery are kept in the most perfect order. Nothing is allowed to be out of place, and the slightest speck of dirt visible in any part, calls forth a sharp rebuke from Mr. Bennett, who makes frequent visits to every department of ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... help himself. But all in vain. The clock struck one, And there was Jim A little bit gone. At half-past five You scarce could see A glimpse of his flapping Handkerchee. And when came noon, And we climbed sky-high, Jim was a speck Slip - slipping by. Come to-morrow, The neighbours say, He'll be past ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... is in the wind! I lay my cheek to the cabin side To feel the weight of his giant hands— A speck, a fly in the blasting tide Of streaming, pitiless, icy sands; A single heart with its feeble beat— A mouse in the lion's throat— A swimmer at sea—a sunbeam's mote In the grasp of a tempest of ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... blue above me, A tiny speck in the sky, Rained down from its bosom's fulness A shower of melody, Dropping through the golden sunlight, And sweetly ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... always that dragging of the general down to the particular, that circumscribing of everything by the personal, every rose a token, the moon something to kiss by, flowers prostituted into bouquets. She thought how happy she was this morning, feeling a little tiny speck of the miracle of life instead of trying to catch it like a wasp under the wine ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... any in the dirt, appears in 'colours', grains, or little nuggets along the base of the half-moon of sand. The more gold there is in the dirt, or the coarser the gold is, the sooner it appears. A practised digger can work off the last speck of gravel, without losing a 'colour', by just working the water round and off in the dish. Also a careful digger could throw a handful of gold in a tub of dirt, and, washing it off in dishfuls, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... to my room and found all my books intact ... in better condition even, than when I was home with them ... there was not a speck of dust anywhere. Evidently my father was not too sick to keep the place clean ... but then, I meditated he would attend to that, with ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... cupfuls of flour, one pint of rich cream, four table- spoonfuls of butter, four of grated Parmesan cheese, a speck of cayenne, two eggs, three quarts of clear soup stock. Mix flour, cream, butter, cheese and pepper together. Place the basin in another of hot water and stir until the mixture becomes a smooth, firm paste. Break into it the two eggs, and mix quickly and thoroughly. ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... separated from the rest will toughen and taste leathery, besides failing in the special purpose of giving lightness to the mixture. After mixing lightly and perfectly all such preparations should be cooked at once. The white "speck" always should be removed from a broken egg, as it is easily distinguished after cooking, and in anything of a liquid nature, such as custards, sauces, etc., it would be hard ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... the cook's tent and crept under the flap. Plainly he had been there before. Flies are everywhere by the million, but he knew where they were particularly plentiful. Half an hour ago I saw a brilliant speck of light on a piece of heath, which I thought was too bright to be the reflection of the moon from some bright object. I found it came from an insect nearly one inch long, jointed like a lobster, the glow coming from the last ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no [-nigher-] {higher} aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... eyes and looked hard at the window. The dim outline of Stark mountain off in the distance began to grow into form, and what was that? A speck of light? It must be his eyes. He rubbed them sleepily and looked again. Yes, a light. Alert at once with the alertness that comes to all boys at the sound of a fire bell or some such alarm, he slid from his bed noiselessly and stole to the window. It was gone! Aw, Gee! He had been ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... dreams—since I am quite sure that the reality would be far less satisfactory than it seems in anticipation. There is "always a fly in the amber" as the saying goes, and my experience is, that the truth more nearly resembles a great big fly with a tiny speck of amber sticking somewhere to its back. For in our dream voyages we overlook the fleas, the mosquitoes, the hunt for lodgings, the struggle with languages, the hundred-and-one disturbances of the spirit which are inseparable ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... of amusement, for in the comprehensive glance which the old lady cast across the library, a glance keen to detect disorder and from which no speck of dust could hope to conceal itself, there remained a trace of that grimness which he had detected at the moment of her entrance. In short, she was still bristling from a recent encounter. So much so that detecting something sympathetic in Harley's smile she availed herself of the presence of ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... he looked the sky suddenly brightened in a tiny spot out to sea. A long pencil of light shot up from the water, and a cloud was tinged with a speck of ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... time she stood and gazed, marveling at the beauty and recalling some of the things her companion of the afternoon had said about his impressions of the place; then suddenly there loomed a dark speck in the near foreground of her meditation, and, looking down annoyed, she discovered the minister like a gnat between the eye and a grand spectacle, his face turned admiringly up to her window, his hand ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... while obeying instructions, in traveling as fast as possible, that one day, the sixth of October, 1846, the party discerned something which, at first, looked like a mere speck moving on the prairies. Watching it with intense anxiety, the little speck increased in size until they saw it emerge, as it were, from the apparent junction of the heavens with the earth, and form a visible line; as the front of this column came nearer ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... applause that the public gave to an acquisition so beautiful and so unique. This diamond was called the "Regent." It is of the size of a greengage plum, nearly round, of a thickness which corresponds with its volume, perfectly white, free from all spot, speck, or blemish, of admirable water, and weighs more than 500 grains. I much applauded myself for having induced the Regent to make ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to-night for wood and water?" we began to ask of each other; for the sun was within an hour of setting. At length a dark green speck appeared, far off on the right; it was the top of a tree, peering over a swell of the prairie; and leaving the trail, we made all haste toward it. It proved to be the vanguard of a cluster of bushes and low trees, that surrounded some pools of water in an extensive hollow; so we ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... reached the level of the table and became visible to Dr. Speer. They were expressly made at my side, instead of, as usual, at my back, so that I might see them. They seemed to develop from a very bright speck, about the size of a pea, until they attained the size of a soda-water tumbler, and showed a soft luminosity like pale moonlight. They seemed to be covered with drapery and to be held by a hand. They faded slowly out, remaining visible about thirty or forty seconds, or perhaps a minute. The ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... glass case than for struggles with the elements which she had so lately gone through, while the canoe lay on the narrow beach, just out of reach of the waves that came booming upon the land, a speck upon the shingles. ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... following that of the king and queen, till only one, apparently the princess' own boat, remained. But she did not want to go home even yet, and the prince thought he saw her order the boat to the shore without her. At all events, it rowed away; and now, of all the radiant company, only one white speck remained. Then the prince began ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... blue moor of the sea where, under the shadow of the high coast of Arran, a vessel appeared as a mere speck upon ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings a people can enjoy, is liberty. But every good in this life has its allay of evil. Licentiousness is the allay of liberty. It is an ebullition, an excrescence; it is a speck upon the eye of the political body, which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand; lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye, upon which it is apt to appear. If the stage becomes at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... had been using a small but powerful telescope, uttered an exclamation, and focussed the instrument on a speck that seemed moving along on the ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... rust expires. All have their manes, and those manes bear: The few, so cleans'd, to these abodes repair, And breathe, in ample fields, the soft Elysian air. Then are they happy, when by length of time The scurf is worn away of each committed crime; No speck is left of their habitual stains, But the pure ether of the soul remains. But, when a thousand rolling years are past, (So long their punishments and penance last,) Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god, Compell'd ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... moves them forth from the kingdom, almost along the Verde, whither he transferred them with extinguished light.[4] By their [5] malediction the Eternal Love is not so lost that it cannot return, while hope hath speck of green. True is it, that whoso dies in contumacy of Holy Church, though he repent him at the end, needs must stay outside[6] upon this bank thirtyfold the whole time that he has been in his presumption,[7] if such decree become not shorter ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... can raise the chains that support it; for he only knows the secret of their machinery. He has left the place for the night. He lives three miles and a half away, at a little village yonder, which looks only a black speck in the distance, and he will not return till some ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam vanishes down ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... ships come with their strange men from other ports of the world. I saw them unfurl their snowy sails and speed over the blue waters bound for the shores of other climes. I watched them until they were but a speck of white down on the blue horizon, and I longed to be on board—to feel the ship roll upon the billows and hear the wind whistling through the rigging, to climb aloft and view the limitless expanse of ocean and ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... he quitted the near view, and let his eye run along the edge of the horizon, until it rested upon a small speck, which he knew to be the lofty spire of Saint Paul's Cathedral. If, as he supposed, the Fair Geraldine was in attendance upon Anne Boleyn, at the palace at Bridewell, she must be under the shadow of this very spire; and the supposition, whether correct ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mass of the planet filled the sub-atomic sky. My hands gripped the rim of the box with excitement. On its surface began to form continents, seas. Good God! was all this really materializing from a speck of matter under the lens of a super-microscope? I was looking down from an immense height upon an ever clarifying panorama. Mountains began to unfold, plains, and suddenly beneath me appeared a mighty ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... preachment, made a mountain. Still, it was a huge disorder to come from a trifle! At the same time who knew better than he upon what a merest trifle nervous excitement will fix the attention! or how to the mental eye such a speck will grow and grow until it absorb the universe! Only a certain other disquieting thought, having come once, would keep returning—that, thoroughly as he believed himself acquainted with her mind, he had very little knowledge of her ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and they pulled an Irish halfpenny, with the harp on, from their pockets, and moistened it with saliva—which in English means spat on it—and then threw it into the pocket on the other side of body. But none of these accredited appeals to heaven put a speck upon the sea where the boats ought to have been, or cast upon the clouds a shade of any sail approaching. Uneasily wondering, the grannies, wives, and little ones went home, when the nightfall quenched all eyesight, and told one ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... Cuddy hatched a new plot. Right across the feeding-ground, almost the only good one now in the Stormy Moon, he set a row of snares. A cottontail rabbit, an old friend, cut several of these with his sharp teeth, but some remained, and Redruff, watching a far-off speck that might turn out a hawk, trod right in one of them, and in an instant was jerked into the air to dangle by ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... ma," he said lightly. "There's not a speck in the lot of them too fine for my eyes." And he knelt down beside the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... holds its quarter-million species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of so-called mental faculties as well as of bodily structure. And this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which, strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the microscope. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... plenty to do in a short while, but meanwhile he enjoyed the sensation of being on a tiny world in space with only a handful of Planeteers for company. He smiled. "King Foster," he said to himself. "Monarch of a thorium space speck." It was a rather nice feeling, even though he laughed at himself for thinking it. Since he was in command of the detachment, he could in all truth say that this was his own personal planet. It would be a good bit of space humor to spring on the ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... he will look upon thee as a fiend-like tempter—he will rush from thy sight—he will never see thee more; his love will be suddenly converted into hatred! Yes, man demands that woman should dishonor herself for his sake; but he will not allow a speck to appear upon what he calls his good name—no, not to save that poor, confiding, lost creature from the lowest depths and dregs of penury into which her frailty may ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... while the barren speck loomed up lore plainly. As they approached closer the boys eagerly scanned the shores for a sight of he mysterious man, or the wrecked motor boat. But they saw nothing, even through the ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... And do you know what a speck means?" demanded Mrs. Caldwell, with no chance in the troubled expression of ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... went down that day, I saw that Miss Amelia looked exactly like her. You would have needed a pick-ax or a crowbar to flake off even a tiny speck of her. When I had waited for my head to be cracked, until I had time to remember that a Crusader didn't dodge and hide, I looked up, and there she stood with the ruler lifted; but now she had turned just the shade of the wattles on our fightingest ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... George Washington, for in such minutiae did the value of the stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or accident—resting on a flaw—founded on a speck—cause no ferment ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... The car shot violently forward, with shrieks and a huge buzzing noise, and leaped up the slope of the street. Rachel, still in the porch, could see Mr. Batchgrew's head wagging rather helplessly from side to side, just above the red speck of the tail-lamp. Then the whole vision was swiftly blotted out, and the warning shrieks of the invisible car grew fainter on the way to Red Cow. It pleased Rachel to think of the old man being casually bullied and ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... two fine lads go up the gangplank, each carrying a red handkerchief containing his worldly goods. As the good ship moved away we lifted a wild wail of woe that drowned the sobbing of the waves. Everybody cried—I wept, too—and as the great, black ship became but a speck on the Western horizon we embraced ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man's lower body—the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... he left the room, and at the moment was unable not to turn a rapid glance upon the book. There it was, safe in its place. How well he knew the appearance of the volume! On the back near the bottom was a small speck, a spot on the binding, which had been so far disfigured by some accident in use. This seemed to his eyes to make it marked and separate among a thousand. To him it was almost wonderful that a stain so peculiar should not at once betray ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... here on the river," said Thrale, "an' ef we don't keep well in the middle uv it they kin reach us with thar bullets. But we won't be able to see the least speck or sign ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wean her from this one sad vice! Wipe out this only speck in her rich volume! Then, all my woes should cease; then, would I write, In truth's fair characters, her matchless worth, Nor blush to boast the fondness of ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... stood there long before a black speck at the end of the avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the entrance. Undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she moved down the gallery her glance rested on the great tapestries, with their ineffable minglings of blue ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... about this harbour. No stockyards, cattle, nor even smoke, although at the highest northern point of the bay I saw a mass of white objects which might have been either tents or vessels. I perceived a white speck, which I took for breakers or white sand, on the projecting point of the north-eastern shore. (B.) On that day nine years exactly I first beheld the heads of Port Jackson, a rather singular coincidence. Thus the mountain on which I stood became an important ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... heart now grieved so bitterly. Aphiz Adegah's life had been a bold one, he knew no fear. The air of his native hills was not freer than his own spirit and as he looked off once more at the tiny white speck in the distance that marked the spot where Komel was, his resolution was instantly made, and he swore to ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... beating the eggs. He cut up the meat into small pieces, and when he was finished, took the egg-beater away from her. He turned it so energetically that a speck of foam ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... orchards that flourish, rank and wild, no longer cared for by pious and loving hands. From the rough road that climbs the mountains to Assunto, the convent is invisible, a gnarled and ragged olive grove intervening, and a spur of cliffs as well, while from Palermo one sees only the speck of white, flashing in the sun, indistinguishable from the many similar gleams of desert monastery or ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... I falsely thought my father, had gone back to Australia with pretended news of Richard Wharton's death. He had sought my widowed mother in her own home up country, and told her a lying tale of his devotion to her husband in his dying moments on that remote ocean speck in the far Southern Pacific. By this story he ingratiated himself. He knew she was rich: he knew she was worth marrying: and to marry her, he had left my own real father, Richard Wharton, to starve ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... up in great alarm at my cheek—but seeing that it was not bleeding, and had no hole in it, she patted it softly with her little tender dimpled hand, and said: "Aunt Fanny, Aunt Fanny," in a little speck of a whisper to herself a ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... and will occasionally lift up his little pipe in a glee. He does not dance, but the honest fellow would give the world to do it; and he leaves his clogs in the passage, though it is a wonder he wears them, for in the muddiest weather he never has a speck on his foot. He was at St. John's College, Cambridge, and was rather gay for a term or two, he says. He is, in a word, full of the milk-and-water of human kindness, and ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to him with his eyes on the ground, for in thought he was with those who were descending to the village. They soon came in sight of the inn, which was scarcely visible, so small did it look, a mere black speck at the foot of that enormous billow of snow. When they opened the door, Sam, the great curly dog, began to ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... following the languid tide and the soft southern breeze, you would perceive that the cobble of rock was a rugged hill with a few bushes and stunted trees growing in the crevices, and that the gleaming speck near the summit must be some kind of a building—if you were on the coast of Italy or Spain you would say a villa or a farm-house. Then, as you floated still farther north and drew nearer to the coast, the desolate hill would detach itself from the mainland and become a little mountain-isle, ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... of the universe. When the flesh was taken away the man ceased to be cowardly, and was ready to fly with the angel past galaxy after galaxy, and infinity after infinity, and so man and angel passed on, viewing the universe, until the sun was out of sight—until our solar system appeared as a speck of light against the black empyrean, and there was only darkness. And they looked onward, and in the infinities of light before, a speck of light appeared, and suddenly they were in the midst of rushing worlds. But they passed beyond that system, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... is coming," said Ned who was in advance. The boy had shaded his eyes from the sun, and his uncommonly keen sight had detected the black moving speck before any of ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a moving speck on the water caught his eye. For a few minutes he watched it in suspense, then ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Ropeyarde and the other yards to do several businesses, he and I also did buy some apples and pork; by the same token the butcher commended it as the best in England for cloath and colour. And for his beef, says he, "Look how fat it is; the lean appears only here and there a speck, like beauty-spots." Having done at Woolwich, we to Deptford (it being very cold upon the water), and there did also a little more business, and so home, I reading all the why to make end of the "Bondman" (which the oftener I read the more I like), and begun "The Duchesse of Malfy;" which seems ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of jelly with some power of slightly varying its actions in accordance with slightly varying circumstances and desires—given such a jelly-speck with a power of assimilating other matter, and thus of reproducing itself, given also that it should be possessed of a memory and a reproductive system, and we can show how the whole animal world can have descended ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... gallant captain, And stood upon the deck; In velvet coat, and ruffles white, Without a spot or speck; And diamond rings, and triple strings Of ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... between God and man, such that the one cannot be defined in analogy with anything human. Neither wisdom, nor goodness, nor justice apply to him; yet the goodness, wisdom and justice of man depend upon him. Man is a finite speck set over against divine infinitude. His life is a constant struggle for survival with forces which have each an equal claim on divine regard with man. Man's salvation, herein, consists in knowing these ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... I—I mean, Mr. Merryweather—I beg your pardon! are actually grim beside Judge Gay; aren't they, Tommy? Did you ever see a grim kitten, Mr. Merryweather? Wouldn't it be too horrid for anything? Well, but what I meant to say is, the only weeniest speck of a fault I ever had to find with the Snowy—darling thing!—was that she was a little bit—just the tiniest winiest scrap—too serious. If your name were Tombs, you know, or Graves, or Scull,—I knew a girl named Scull,—of course you would have to be serious to live up to it; but when your ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... baby, and fondly believed it to be a human wonder. He was solicitous on the score of its infantile ailments, and loaded it with gifts and toys beyond the scope of its enjoyment. He went about the house whistling more exuberantly than ever. There was no speck on his horizon; no fly in his pot of ointment. It was he who urged that the child should be christened promptly, though Dr. Glynn was not disposed to dwell on the clerical barbarism as to the destiny of unbaptized infants. Babcock was cultivating ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... destructiveness. Don't you understand me? You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman's gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I hate to see water-power wasted, manure ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... her pulse by pulse, as the excitement grows in a man waiting for a friend at a station; he sees first the faint smoke like a cloud on the skyline, and then a black speck beneath the smoke, and next the engine draws up on him with a humming of the rails which grows at length to ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... night breeze among the bushes and the brambles of the downs. But the people who were approaching were doubtless mistrustful people, for this real silence and apparent solitude did not satisfy them. Their boat, therefore, scarcely as visible as a dark speck upon the ocean, glided along noiselessly, avoiding the use of their oars for fear of being heard, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... laugh, in which he did not fail to join in unison. "But are you aware of the usefulness and national importance of the projector's plans? said Crony. "Not I," responded the citizen: "I hates all projections of breweries, bridges, buildings, and boring companies, from the Golden-lane speck to the Vaterloo; from thence up to the new street, and down to the tunnel under the Thames, vich my banker, Sir William Curtis, says, is the greatest bore in London." "But humanity, sir," said Crony, "has, I hope, some influence with you; ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... fast, Miss Esther," she returned, good-humoredly. "You've had a fine sleep, to be sure, and young things will stand a mortal amount of fatigue; but there isn't a speck of color in your face, my poor lamb. Well, well," as I showed signs of impatience—"I won't disturb Miss Ruth, but I will fetch you some coffee and bread-and- butter, and we will see how ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... next morning, after a good deal of handshaking, and Taffy looked after them wistfully as they turned to wave their caps and trudged away over the rise towards the cross-roads. Away to the left in the wintry sunshine a speck of scarlet caught his eye against the blue-grey of the towans. He watched it as it came slowly towards him, and his heart leapt—yet not quite as he had expected it ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... down his face. All this must have been pleasant to him, or he would not have done it; and there is no doubt that he is indebted to the stimulus thus applied to his eyes for the measure of sight he now enjoys. When five or six years of age, a small, comparatively clear speck appeared in one of his eyes; and it was discovered that within a very small space he could see any bright object. That eye has continued to clear, until he is now able to see luminous bodies at a distance, and can distinguish small bodies by bringing them close to his eye. Persons ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... in an incredible space of time he had gathered together his routed army, and was as formidable as before. The Germans liked the bold old fellow, and called, and still call him, Marshal Forwards. He had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl. To our minds, the best of all these heroes is Robert Hall, the preacher, who, after falling on the ground in paroxysms of pain, would rise with a smile, and say, "I suffered much, but I did not cry out, did ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Matilda Anne, for the next few weeks.... I got up and went to the window and looked out. The moon was big and yellow, like a cheese. And the midnight prairie itself seemed so big and wide and lonely, and I seemed such a tiny speck on its face, so far away from every one, from God himself, that the courage went out of my body like the air out of a tire. Dinky-Dunk was right; it is life ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... Wisdom.—Sir Isaac Newton was once riding over Salisbury Plain, when a boy, keeping sheep, called to him—"Sir, you had better make haste on, or you will get a wet jacket." Newton looking round and observing neither clouds nor speck on the horizon, jogged on, taking very little notice of the rustic's information. He had made but a few miles, when a storm suddenly arising, wetted him to the skin. Surprised at the circumstance, and determined, if possible, to ascertain how an ignorant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... enclosed in a grasp as strong as a man's; and three minutes later Mrs Olliver—whose seat on a horse was as ungainly as her hand on its mouth was perfect—had become a mere speck ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Abraham Soft Raymond Sogue Assia Sole Nathan Solley Ebenezer Solomon Thomas Solomon James Sooper Christian Soudower Moses Soul Nathaniel Southam William Southard Henry Space Enoch Spalding Joshua Spaner Charles Sparefoot James Sparrows John Speake Martin Speakl James Spear Eliphaz Speck Elchie Spellman William Spellman James Spencer Joseph Spencer Nicholas Spencer Thomas Spencer Solomon Spenser Henry Spice John Spicer (2) Lancaster Spicewood John Spier (2) Richard Spigeman John Spinks ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... and worn, he kept his deck, And peered through darkness. Ah, that night Of all dark nights! And then a speck— A light! A light! A light! A light! It grew, a starlit flag unfurled! It grew to be Time's burst of dawn. He gained a world; he gave that world Its grandest lesson: ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... along with an innumerable host of stars, display their radiance to adorn the firmament of that magnificent world. He can wing his flight through the still more distant regions of the universe, leaving the sun and all his planets behind him, till they appear like a scarcely discernible speck in creation, and contemplate thousands and millions of stars and starry systems beyond the range of the unassisted eye, and wander among the suns and worlds dispersed throughout the boundless dimensions ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... was the sight of the great ocean itself, for we were out of sight of land. All round us, on both sides of the ship, ahead and astern, nothing was to be seen but water-water—water; not a single glimpse of green shore, not the smallest island, or speck of moss any where. Never did I realize till now what the ocean was: how grand and majestic, how solitary, and boundless, and beautiful and blue; for that day it gave no tokens of squalls or hurricanes, such as I had heard my father tell of; nor could I imagine, how any thing that ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... less than an hour we got above two hundred. Those which had a little black spot or two on the shell we ate the same day, as it was a sign that they were not fresh, and of course would not keep; those which had no speck were put into dry sand, and were good ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... dearie. Your own natural skin is no more color-fast. I handled Elaine Doremus in 'The Snowdrop' for three seasons. Never so much as a speck or a spot on her. My cream ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... floating far in the very middle of the river. A more critical experiment awaited us; for our little mule-cart was but ill-fitted for the passage of so swift a stream. We watched it with anxiety till it seemed to be a little motionless white speck in the midst of the waters; and it WAS motionless, for it had stuck fast in a quicksand. The little mules were losing their footing, the wheels were sinking deeper and deeper, and the water began to rise through the bottom and drench the goods within. All of us ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... a satisfaction to know that thus far the gloomy forebodings of the Seer had not been fulfilled. On looking out through a six-inch rose-window, I saw joyous daylight dancing over the boundless, placid waters,—not a speck of land in sight. We must have started long since; but my eyes, fast sealed under the opiate rays of the Luminary, had hitherto refused to ope their lids to the garish beams of his rival. Soon I heard beneath a rustling snap, as of a bow, and suddenly there sped ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Merrit's expected arrival, when the last flower had been put in the vases, and the last speck of dust flecked from the matting, Yuki San's keen eyes detected a torn place in the paper door which separated the ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... salvation on either side. No glory awaits the Southern Confederacy, even if it does achieve its independence; it will be a mere speck in the world, with no weight or authority. The North confesses itself lost without us, and has paid an unheard-of ransom to regain us. On the other hand, conquered, what hope is there in this world for us? Broken in health and fortune, reviled, contemned, abused by those who claim already to ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... schooner until it was a mere white speck on the horizon, a faint idea that it might yet see the error of its ways and return for her chaining her to the spot. Compelled at last to recognise the inevitable, she rose from the turf on which she had been sitting and, her face crimson with wrath, ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Treherne answered, "I hear, see, and understand many things that escape others. Jasper, allow me to advise you to smooth the hair which your sleep has disarranged. Mrs. Snowdon, permit me. This rich velvet catches the least speck." And with his handkerchief he delicately brushed away several streaks of white dust which clung ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... Tom, but I speck he's only jist a' animal. No, I reckon dat won't do, nuther, he ain't big enough for a' animal. He mus' be a bug. Yassir, dat's what ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... well, and rub salt inside of it; tie it up, and put it on the fire in cold water; throw a handful of salt into the fish-kettle. Boil a small fish 15 minutes; a large one 30 minutes. Serve it without the smallest speck and scum; drain. Garnish it with lemon, horseradish, the milt, roe, and liver. Oyster or shrimp sauce ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... just as clear on the radiation and heat-screens. The Keegarkan ship was completely blacked out, but the radiations from her engines and the distinctive radiation-pattern of her contragravity-field showed clearly, and there was a speck that marked her position on the radar-screen. The same position was marked with a pin-point of light on the vision-screen—some device on the Sky-Spy, synchronized with the detectors, kept it focused there. The Company ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... enthusiast, in figured trowsers and a gay cravat. "Our beloved Union must and shall be preserved. The fabric that our fathers reared for us must not be allowed to crumble. We will prop it with our mangled bodies," and he brushed a speck of dust from the fine ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... which a flag was ordered to be hoisted whenever a ship might appear, which should serve as a direction to her and as a signal of approach to us. Here, on the summit of a hill, did we sweep the horizon every morning from day-light until the sun sunk, in the hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the ocean, the heart bounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. If a ship appeared here, we knew that she must be bound to us; for on the shore of this vast ocean, the largest in the world, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... pyramid. There was not for miles round that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill. And this was a slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance, as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked out in pink letters the name ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... are prepared for market. The work is all done by hand, which is one reason that they are so expensive. They are first worked in saw-dust; cleaned, scraped, washed, shaved, plucked, dyed with a hand-brush from eight to twelve times, washed again and freed from the least speck of grease by a last bath in hot ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... earth. I've heard him say that often, and you needn't be afraid of his not bein' able to pay you. A lot more than that man would have paid you for his little gal, if you'd catched the right one. So if you take me to Pop, and get me there safe and sound, it will be an awful good speck for you.' ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... from the sea, and began to search the green slopes around, and then all at once she uttered a cry of joy as she could sight, on the highest slope right at the end of the valley, a white speck which suddenly appeared out of the earth, and then stood out clear on the green turf, and seemed to be looking about before ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely her cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like employment of cultivating flowers, and—with her recluse habits, and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the house—would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe among the fraternity of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of liberty. One of the greatest blessings we enjoy, one of the greatest blessings a people can enjoy, is liberty. But every good in this life has its allay of evil. Licentiousness is the allay of liberty. It is an ebullition, an excrescence; it is a speck upon the eye of the political body, which I can never touch but with a gentle, with a trembling hand; lest I destroy the body, lest I injure the eye, upon which it is apt to appear. If the stage becomes at any time licentious, if a play appears ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to have an enjoyment which the ardent lover of nature alone can appreciate. Far as the eye can look, there is uninterrupted harmony. Splendid plains covered with the fleecy tribe, and here and there (alas! only but here and there) a speck of water, enough to vindicate nature from the charge of utter neglect—and no more. A glance thrown in another direction brings to your view an endless tract of country deprived even of these solitary specks, where the grass grows as high as your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... miles out on the gulf, at first like a tiny black speck, appeared the steamer. Nearer and nearer it came, growing larger and larger as it approached. The dark waters heaved up in huge waves as her bow pierced their depths. The foam dashed high, as if in angry protest at the intruder. And ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... Said the Rowe stuff was recording as if he was actually living the part. There were no extraneous sublevels at all and that's just never happened before. It's like Lorancelli says about Rowe dying and the character coming to life. Zack swears that Rowe just disappears. There isn't a speck of him that ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... of dress, especially to the chiefs and chiefesses, who are all remarkably tall and handsome, with a stately carriage and dignified manner. The Queen stood in front of the throne, on which were spread the royal robes, a long mantle of golden feathers, without speck or blemish. On each side stood two men, dressed in black, wearing frock-coats, and capes of red, black, and yellow feathers over their shoulders, and chimney-pot hats on their heads. In their hands they held two enormous kahilis of black oo feathers, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... hazarded the speculation that the origin of life on this planet has been the falling upon it of the fragments of a meteor, or an aerolite from some other system, with a speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever may be the case in regard to physical life, that is absolutely true in the case of spiritual life. It all originates because this heaven-descended Christ has come down ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Prince. Thence to the Ropeyarde and the other yards to do several businesses, he and I also did buy some apples and pork; by the same token the butcher commended it as the best in England for cloath and colour. And for his beef, says he, "Look how fat it is; the lean appears only here and there a speck, like beauty-spots." Having done at Woolwich, we to Deptford (it being very cold upon the water), and there did also a little more business, and so home, I reading all the why to make end of the "Bondman" ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... we don't want these would-be murderers to know how their trick failed. That's the reason I didn't pound the brute to a jelly on the bed, for it would have made such a mess on the sheet. Now there isn't a speck on it. I'll take the vase with me into my room and finish the cobra off. In the morning I'll get rid of its body somehow. When these devils find tomorrow that you're not dead, they'll be very puzzled. Now, the question is, what are you ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... or less noisy and loquacious. About noon a thin white veil began to blur the distant southern mountains. It was like a white dream slowly descending upon them. The first flake or flakelet that reached me was a mere white speck that came idly circling and eddying to the ground. I could not see it after it alighted. It might have been a scale from the feather of some passing bird, or a larger mote in the air that the stillness was allowing to settle. Yet it was the altogether inaudible and infinitesimal trumpeter ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... courtyard clean, bringing in a barrel of water twice a day, splitting and dragging in wood for the kitchen and the house, keeping out strangers, and watching at night. And it must be said he did his duty zealously. In his courtyard there was never a shaving lying about, never a speck of dust; if sometimes, in the muddy season, the wretched nag, put under his charge for fetching water, got stuck in the road, he would simply give it a shove with his shoulder, and set not only the cart ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... be—our finite minds cannot grasp that which may not exist in accordance with the conditions which obtain about us upon the outside of the insignificant grain of dust which wends its tiny way among the bowlders of the universe—the speck of moist dirt we ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... seated upon the sideboard swinging their legs. Rowden cast a satisfied glance at the table laid for fifteen and flicked an imaginary speck ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... the far slopes next the mountains, a black speck rolled into view, the nucleus of a little dust cloud. Her face brightened a little; she turned abruptly and sought easy footing down that ridge, and climbed hurriedly the longer rise beyond. Once or twice, when she was on high ground, she glanced behind her uneasily, as does one whose mind ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... as a speck of dirt, then, were it?" she queried. "And maybe mine ain't for Daddy. But the student air a-prayin' for him! It air a damn shame ye ain't got him a-prayin' for yerself and the kid.... Ye'd a seen yer man before now, and the ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... till twenty, which is erua ahuru, this is two tens; twenty-one consists of the terms for two tens and one. In this manner they count to ten tens, which is rau. Ten raus is one mano, or thousand; ten manos one million, and so on. How exactly the Algonquin method, but not a speck of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... fare again Forth o'er the heads of men, Nor other Summers for its Sanctuary: But from your mind's chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among your soul's forlornest things; A speck upon your memory, alack! A dead ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... the island was going down slowly but surely. In a few minutes it was but a mere speck on the surface, and then even ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... plodded and churned her way onward. Every day and all day the same pale-blue sky and the unwinking sun bent over that moving speck. Every day and all day the same black-blue water-world, untouched by any known wind, smooth as a slab of syenite, colourful as an opal, stretched out and around and beyond and before and behind us, forever, illimitable, empty. Every day ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... Goose wuz down dar dabblin' in soapsuds en washin' cloze, he sorter lick he chops, en 'low dat some er dese odd-come-shorts he gwine ter call en pay he 'specks. De minnit he say dat, Brer Rabbit, he know sump'n' 'uz up, en he 'low ter hisse'f dat he 'speck he better whirl in en have some fun w'iles it gwine on. Bimeby Brer Fox up'n say ter Brer Rabbit dat he bleedzd ter be movin' 'long todes home, en wid dat ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... that was faintly silvered by the moon there was a black speck. It was, or seemed from the distance to be, motionless. Hermione's eyes were attracted to it, and again her imagination carried her to Sicily. She stood on the shore by the inlet, she saw the boat coming in from the open sea. Then it ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... glade clash cream swim blind grade crash dream spend grind shade smash gleam speck spike trade trash steam fresh smile skate slash stream whelp while brisk drove blush cheap carve quilt grove flush peach farce filth stove slush teach parse pinch clove brush reach barge flinch smote crush bleach large mince ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... foe. A dyke through the mist before us hover'd, And, quicken'd by voice and heel, The black overleap'd it, stagger'd, recover'd; Still nearer that muffled peal. And louder on sward the hoof-strokes grew, And duller, though not less nigh, On deader sand; and a dark speck drew On my vision suddenly, And a single horseman in fleet career, Like a shadow appear'd to glide To within six lances' lengths of our rear, And there for a space to bide. Quoth Harold, "Speak, has the moon reveal'd His face?" I replied, "Not so! ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... hermetically sealed trap-door. Brand threw the control switch and precisely at eleven o'clock the conical shell of metal shot heavenward, gathering such speed that it was soon invisible to human eyes. He set their course toward the blazing speck that was Jupiter, four hundred million miles away; and then reported their start by radio to Commander ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... over that scene? We hate the old drivelers less when, a few minutes later, they truckle and temporize with the awful shape, who comes forth with a splash of blood on her slender wrist, and a speck or two on her white, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... follow was one which the Count was anxious not to see. He therefore turned his back and pretended to brush from his sleeve a speck of dust revealed to his searching eye in the strong afternoon light which streamed through the open door. Then Vjera's low-spoken word of thanks and her light tread made him aware that she had received her ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... worlds beyond worlds circling through gulfs of space. But here in the primordial solitudes, under the solemn cope of the sky, the thought lost its terror. He seemed in harmony with the universe, part of it as was each speck of star dust. Without question or understanding he felt secure, convinced of his oneness with the great design, cradled ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... one of those historical novels once about a chap—a buck he would have been, no doubt, or a macaroni or some such bird as that—who, when people said the wrong thing, merely laughed down from lazy eyelids and flicked a speck of dust from the irreproachable Mechlin lace at his wrists. This was practically what I did now. At least, I straightened my tie and smiled one of those inscrutable smiles of mine. I then withdrew and went out for a saunter in ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... pleasure. Especially did my heart leap when I took the Countess to the window a little to the right, and, pointing with one hand upwards, put the Count's binocular into her hands. The sun of the mid-noon was shining on a black speck floating from the topmost cliff of the Piz Langrev. As she looked she flung out her hand to me, still continuing to gaze with the glass held in the other. She saw her own scarlet favour flying from the pine-branch. That cry of wonder and delight was better to me than the Victoria ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Socrates, a Plato, or an Aristotle, however confessedly inferior in knowledge to the philosophers of the present day, do not appear to have been much below them in intellectual capacity. Intellect rises from a speck, continues in vigour only for a certain period, and will not perhaps admit while on earth of above a certain number of impressions. These impressions may, indeed, be infinitely modified, and from these various modifications, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... To the westward was Goulburn's Range, distant about five or six miles; its bold rocky peaks of lofty elevation forming a striking contrast to the dead level of the country southerly, in which however Mount Aiton appeared like a blue speck on the horizon. To the northward was Mount Granard, the highest of a very elevated range, it having been seen at a distance of seventy-two miles from Mount Aiton; and to the north-north-east were extensive open flats; in one place, bearing N. 17. E., ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... mother scans face and hands and tiny curled-up feet. Finding all in order, he wiped it with a silk handkerchief (the special property of the instrument; a cotton one did duty for himself), polished it, and tuned it, and polished again. "Must look well, my beauty," he murmured; "must look well. Not a speck of dust but she'd feel it with those little fingers, you know. Ready now? Well, then, speak up for your master; speak, voice of my heart! 'A welcome for Rosin the Beau.' Ask for ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... house and had the preveleage of possessing a beautiful view both back and front. The front looked out across miles of woodland scenery with no sign of human inhabetance any where safe a single cottage which stood out like a white speck among ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... the distance a moving speck on the water caught his eye. For a few minutes he watched it in suspense, then gave a cheer ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the mountain, deepening its rose-tint and gaining in intensity what it lost in expanse,—diminished to a handbreadth, to a point, and, flickering an instant, went out, leaving in the whole range of vision no speck of sunlight to relieve the wilderness of shadowy gloom. I had come under a spell,—for, often as I had seen the sun set in the mountains and over the lakes, I had never before felt as I now felt, that I was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... seen smoothing and dressing their fur, somewhat in the manner of a cat. After having smoothed and dressed each other's fur, both turn their attention to their young, from whose coats they remove the smallest speck of dirt, at the same time trying to keep their hair smooth and unruffled. The Guinea-pig feeds on bread, grain, fruit, vegetables, tea leaves, and especially garden parsley, to which it is very partial. It generally gives birth to seven and eight young at a time, and they very ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... charming sang-froid he fully bore out his previous description. He was as clean and refreshing looking as a madrono-tree in the dust-blown forest. An odor of scented soap and freshly ironed linen was wafted from him; there was scarcely a crease in his white waistcoat, nor a speck upon his varnished shoes. He might have been an auditor of the previous conversation, so quickly and completely did he seem to take in the whole situation at a glance. Perhaps there was an extra tilt to his black-ribboned Panama hat, and a certain dancing ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... company assembled numbered about fifty, the room being big enough to hold three hundred. I have a vision still before me, of twenty out of these fifty guests, solemnly executing intricate figure-dances, under the superintendence of an infirm local dancing-master—a mere speck of fidgety human wretchedness twisting about in the middle of an empty floor. I see, faintly, down the dim vista of the Past, an agreeable figure, like myself, with a cocked hat under its arm, black tights ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... we proceeded to pass over it. As we crossed the banks there came a rushing sound from beneath us, as of a mighty gust of wind, and, looking through one of the small windows in the side of the car, I saw in the distance a speck, which, in another moment, disappeared. Our aerenoid now gently rocked with the motion of a boat that is in the swell of a passing steamer, and I instantly realized that another aerenoid, travelling at a terrific speed, had passed in the canal ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... a lonely life. Especially lonely on a large farm in the West. The life of a hired man like Bradley Talcott is spent mainly with the horses and cattle. In the spring he works day after day with a drag or seeder, moving to and fro an animate speck across a dull brown expanse of soil. Even when he has a companion there is little talk, for there is little to say, and the extra exertion of speaking against the wind, or across distances, soon forces them ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... features of the place. The house she found lower-ceiled and smaller than she remembered it. The Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone. But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... on the white speck which was visible on the margin of the ocean, and which the 'Skimmer of the Seas' confidently pronounced to be the Water-Witch. None but a seaman could have felt this certainty; for, seen from the low raft, there was little else to be distinguished ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the right on the cliffs, dotted about which lay Eilygugg, there was a white speck here and a blue speck there, and a little more intent gazing proved to the lad that there was another speck upon the edge of the ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... promised candy and oranges and even wedding-cake, for she forgot she hadn't a speck of wedding-cake in ...
— Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land and other Stories • Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman
... then flatter himself that he is riding wide and making a line for himself. But to be entrapped into a field without any power of getting out of it; to see the red backs of the forward men becoming smaller and smaller in the distance, till the last speck disappears over some hedge; to see the fence before you and know that it is too much for you; to ride round and round in an agony of despair which is by no means mute, and at last to give sixpence to some boy to conduct you back ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... out my field-glass and directed it at a little speck high above our heads. It was the basket floating high in the air. I gave the glass to my wife to look, but she did not want to ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... come home and tell Mother all about it, and we'll take a fresh start. You're pretty fairly, tolerably, moderately good children after all! Only I want you to grow a little speck better each day." ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... head, and all but meeting under his shaggy hair, at once fixed his choice on him as 'likest his work.' That work was to defend the sheep from the wolves, and one mode of defence was by laying a strange trap for the enemy. The dog was remarkably like a sheep, his hair white without a dark speck, and he carried a great load of it, long and fleecy like wool. In the Hungarian steppes four or five of those dogs would lay themselves down on the grass in the evening, sleeping there like so many harmless lambs, with their faces inward for the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... again in its case, her pole touching the snow, she approached until she could look down. Only the steep wall on the far side, sinking straight and black into the swollen torrent, only a little speck of white far down which might have been a struggling body or ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... "Not a speck," answered Le Farge. "DAMN that Irishman! but for him I'd have got the boats away properly victualled and all; as it is I don't know what we've got aboard. You, Jenkins, what have you got ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... because they cultivated the Sikyonian plain, or owned that part of Marathon around Oenoe, or held possession of a thousand acres at Acharnae. Of the whole of Greece, as it then appeared to me from above, being about the size of four fingers, I think Attica was in proportion a mere speck. So that I wondered on what condition it was left to these rich men ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... turned to offer help, but the Lecomte was ever a Levite where we were concerned; and when we were ready to go on, the grey car was not even a speck in the distance. Luckily, however, there was little or no doubt where its ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... prey, and I should soon have sunk beneath this misery. Once, after the poor animals that conveyed me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and one, sinking under his fatigue, died, I viewed the expanse before me with anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I strained my sight to discover what it could be and uttered a wild cry of ecstasy when I distinguished a sledge and the distorted proportions of a well-known form within. Oh! With what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart! ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... that far in his story he stopped a minute and sighed, and filled his pipe again, and took out his handkerchief, and said he guessed a little speck of ashes had got into ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... picaninny's cry; surrounded as we were by a boundless sea of sand, it made one think how small a speck our party was on the face of the earth; it somehow took one's thoughts back to civilisation and crowded cities, and one felt that it was not just very certain if one would see such things again; and how little it would take to wipe us ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... in this direction yet a little further, he could see the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his Elfride that night. And at the same time he noticed, coming over the hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion. It seemed first to be a sea-gull flying low, but ultimately proved to be a human figure, running with great rapidity. The form flitted on, heedless of the rain which had caused Stephen's halt in this place, dropped down the heathery hill, entered ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... feel very sad when you climb on the fence to watch mama out of sight. The women in the alley poke their heads out of doorways and watch her too. You know her by the way she holds her shoulders till she is only a speck in a chain of specks— till she is swallowed up. But suppose that day after day you were to watch for her face and it didn't come back? Suppose it were to drop out of the string of white faces like the pearl out of my ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... stood and gazed, marveling at the beauty and recalling some of the things her companion of the afternoon had said about his impressions of the place; then suddenly there loomed a dark speck in the near foreground of her meditation, and, looking down annoyed, she discovered the minister like a gnat between the eye and a grand spectacle, his face turned admiringly up to her window, his hand lifted ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... Not a speck of dust was to be seen from the altar to the porch, and the behavior of the congregation was ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... it seem'd a little speck And then it seem'd a mist: It mov'd and mov'd, and took at last A ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... her again late—incredibly late—that night as the moon swept from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he drew himself upright and ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... north-easter fifty winters long Has bronzed and shrivelled sere her face and neck; Her locks are wild and grey, her teeth a wreck; Her foot is vast, her bowed leg spare and strong. A wide blue cloak, a squat and sturdy throng Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck, A white vest broidered black, her person deck, Nor seems their picked, stern, old-world quaintness wrong. Her great creel forehead-slung, she wanders nigh, Easing the heavy strap with gnarled, brown fingers, The spirit of traffic ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... was dealt out in rather meagre potions, 'bout three months in the winter after the wood was cut, sawed and split, and piled up in the wood-shed. We allus had to work in the summer, make hay and fill the barn in, and not till winter come could get a speck of larnin,' and then it took most of our time to pile wood into the stove and settle our personal accounts with the teacher." An audible titter ran through the audience at this sally. "And yet when I was young, though this community was rather behind ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... we all for do here, when you leff? 'speck ebbery ting be dull, wuss nor ditch-water. No more fun—no more shuffle-foot. Old maussa no like de fiddle, and nebber hab party and jollication like udder people. Don't tink I can stay here, Mass Ra'ph, after ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... was a speck of white cloudiness in the late afternoon sky. It grew swiftly in size, and a winking blue-white light appeared in its center. That light grew brighter—and the noise managed somehow to increase—and presently the ruddy sunlight was diluted by light from the rockets ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... taken possession of the territory from the great pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that flies from one to the other over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be miserable cowards to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not yet seen one turn ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... known, according to their shape, as bacilli ("rod-shaped" organisms), or as cocci (round, or "berry-shaped" organisms)—are so tiny that a thousand of them would have to be rolled together in a ball to make a speck visible to the naked eye. But they have some little weight, after all, and seldom float around in the air, so to speak, of their own accord, but only where currents of air are kept stirred up and moving, without much opportunity to escape, and especially where there ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... "Lifted up above this little speck called earth. But now, no more of this. Go to Zara; keep your mind well employed; study, read, and pray—pray much and often in few and simple words, and with as utterly unselfish a heart as you can prepare. Think that you are going to some high festival, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the way, was not a member of the society—discovered a tiny world in the vacant gap. Although eagerly welcomed, as better than nothing, it was a disappointing find. The new world was a mere rock. A speck of about 160 miles in diameter. It was obviously never intended that such a body should have all this space to itself. And, sure enough, shortly after, another small world was discovered. Then another was found, and another, and so on; and now more than 400 ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... themselves indestructible but capable of destroying everything within sight, and most things out of sight, were the only recognized results of man's inventive faculties. To build bigger, stronger, and more ships than the French was England's glory. To hit a speck with a rifle bullet at 800 yards distance was an Englishman's first duty. The proper use for a young man's leisure hours was the practice of drilling. All this had come upon us with very quick steps ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... to the gate which separated him from us. "Mas' John, I speck de President he dun' know de cullud people like we knows 'um, else he nebber bin 'pint dat ar boss in ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... of speaking, when his quick eye detected a speck in view around a bend in the river, some distance back. He halted, ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... not know where Myra was. He, himself, was here in Vancouver, alone, a stranger, a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far beach by the receding tides of war. He had no funds worth considering, but money was not as yet an item of consideration. He was not disabled. Physically he was more fit than he had ever been. The delicate mechanism of ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... her eyes with her hand and gazing eagerly out toward the speck that was growing larger every minute. "Oh, wouldn't it ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... is of no family. None, they say; literally a common woman. Of course, we have out-islanders, who MAY be villeins; but we give them the benefit of the doubt, which is impossible with Helen of Vailima; our blot, our pitted speck. The pitted speck I have said is our precentor. It is always a woman who starts Samoan song; the men who sing second do not enter for a bar or two. Poor, dear Faauma, the unchaste, the extruded Eve of our Paradise, knew only two hymns; but Helen seems to know the whole repertory, and the morning ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Shipyard opened out, Charley edged into it to get the smoother water. Benicia was in view, and we were bowling along over comparatively easy water, when a speck of a boat danced up ahead of us, directly in our course. It was low-water slack. Charley and I looked at each other. No word was spoken, but at once the yacht began a most astonishing performance, veering and yawing as though ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... on the mountain top and dusky evening over all the country round about. But Pegasus flew so high that he overtook the departed day, and was bathed in the upper radiance of the sun. Ascending higher and higher, he looked like a bright speck, and at last could no longer be seen in the hollow waste of the sky. And Bellerophon was afraid that he should never behold him more. But while he was lamenting his own folly the bright speck reappeared, and drew nearer and nearer until it descended lower than the sunshine; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... happy scenes of domestic honor and prosperity, that angel should have drawn up the curtain, and unfolded the rising glories of his country, and whilst he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur of England, the genius should point out to him a little speck, scarce visible in the mass of the national interest, a small seminal principle rather than a formed body, and should tell him,—"Young man, there is America,—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) See! There he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is running round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past the Policemen, specks too—selected large ones from the country. I think he's going to dinner with the Speaker—some old thing like that. Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?—I can't quite see.... And now he's up and speaking in ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... and up and down the stairs, his pulse beat low as if in the presence of death. Everything was as they had left it, when they went out of the house, and it appeared to Kenton that nothing had been touched there since, though when he afterwards reported to his wife that there was not a speck of dust anywhere she knew that Mary had been going through the house, in their absence, not once only, but often, and she felt a pang of grateful jealousy. He got together the things that Mrs. Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the long outline of Malabar Hill quite clearly, and below all its trees and gardens and the great houses rising among them, but at one part, the highest, the hill is kept for other uses. Look up into the clear blue sky overhead, do you see a black speck? Not got it yet? Wait a moment and try again. There! That is right, and there is another and another; you can't help seeing them now. Their flight is the slow heavy flight of clumsy birds. What do you suppose they ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... rest will toughen and taste leathery, besides failing in the special purpose of giving lightness to the mixture. After mixing lightly and perfectly all such preparations should be cooked at once. The white "speck" always should be removed from a broken egg, as it is easily distinguished after cooking, and in anything of a liquid nature, such as custards, sauces, etc., it would be ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... step or two. Beyond was inky darkness. If only a speck of light were down below! Why did I shut the door? Go on I could not. I turned my face upward, where the friendly light, packing up its robes of every hue for the journey of a night, looked kindly in. And so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... But it was such a chase as never you did watch. On and on went the heron, the falcon ever mounting higher and higher, till she was but a speck in the clouds, and Tam Falconer shouting and galloping, mad lest she should go down the wind. Methought she would have been back to Norroway, the ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a century throughout Canada's great plains, the red coat of the Mounted Policeman was the visible and definite assurance that right was might. A red speck on the horizon was notice to both weak and strong, honest and dishonest, that the rule of law prevailed; while experience taught white men and red that 'Law' meant even-handed justice as between man and ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... as we stood in front of our tent watching the sun above the horizon, we saw in the distance a black speck coming over the snow. We watched! What could it be? The speck came nearer, and we recognized a woman with a bludgeon coming towards us as fast as her skees could carry her. As soon as she was within hearing distance she shouted, "Wolves! Wolves!" The dreaded news had come; the wolves had made their ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... savory messes— Besides unnumbered fond caresses." The wolf, by force of appetite, Accepts the terms outright, Tears glistened in his eyes; But faring on, he spies A galled spot on the mastiff's neck. "What's that?" he cries. "Oh, nothing but a speck." "A speck?"—"Ay, ay: 'tis not enough to pain me: Perhaps the collar's mark by which they chain me." "Chain! chain you! What! run you not, then, Just where you please and when?" "Not always, sir; but what ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... "Well," he said, "I can't see any, I will call them back." He called out "Sambo!" which was the name of the Corporal, "Where track?" Sambo pointed to a blade of spinifex. I asked "Where?" He answered, "There." So I got off my horse, and there was a tiny speck of blood which had dropped on the root, and had not been washed off by the rain. It turned out the Myalls had been carrying the flesh of my horses, and the blood ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... said than the intensely red speck of fire was glowing within the pipe-bowl and the scarecrow, without waiting for the witch's bidding, applied the tube to his lips and drew in a few short, convulsive whiffs, which soon however became ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... clung around thee on the deck, Welling with sunny hopes 'neath sunny skies; The wide horizon round thee had no speck; E'en Doubt herself ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... all its vastness, would not have been utterly invisible. Elenko leaned over the battlements, and watched the racing meteors. Prometheus stood by her, and pointed out in the immeasurable distance the little speck of shining dust from which ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... through the deep; Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep, Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise, Which, by the toil of gathering energies, Their upward way into clear sunshine keep, Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences, Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green Into a pleasant island in the seas, Where, mid fall palms, the cane-roofed home is seen, And wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour, Hearing the leaves and loving God's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the bunk house and thought of these things, his eye was attracted by a speck moving toward him across the prairie. He watched it with the interest one might have in a ship at sea; as one watches in a place in which few moving things are seen. The speck was small, and was coming ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... shout, both boys rushed headlong up the turret stairs, and came to the top so breathless, that they could not even ask the warder what he saw. He pointed, and the keen-eyed Alberic exclaimed, "I see! Look, my Lord, a speck there on ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the railway engine appeared, to the immense relief of everyone. We climbed into the trucks and the return journey began. The shelling continued unabated. Above the belt of poplars a little black speck was moving along at great speed. Around it and trailing behind it were numerous black puffs. The frogs had ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... till nearly noon, the company caught sight of a scarcely-perceptible object on the water, in the direction of the great inlet. And, although for some time it appeared like a speck, as seen against the low, green fringe of the opposite and far-distant shore, yet it at length so enlarged on the vision that the form of a canoe and the gleam of flashing oars became distinctly discernible. Soon a little variation in the line of approach ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... all. I believed, for a moment or two, that I saw a black dot there, but it was only my fancy creating what I expected my sight to behold. Let us look again all around the horizon, where it touches the water, following it as we would a line. Ah, I think I see a dark speck, just a black mote at this distance, and I am still unable to separate fancy from fact, but it may be fact. What do ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... puffed and buffeted for about forty minutes before we arrived at the little speck of an island that is Quarantine. Long before we were there we sighted the great La Montaigne near the group of buildings on the island, where she had been waiting since early morning for the tide and the customs ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... vestiges of a great city. Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense piles of scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflecting the Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speck of life. A world absolutely and completely dead, fixed, still, motionless—save when a gigantic land-slide, breaking off the vertical wall of a crater, plunged down into the soundless depths, with all the fury too of a crashing avalanche, with all the speed of a Niagara, but, in the total absence ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... to rage. Beasts, they were! If only he could take a flying leap on to them, or roll a few stones down and scare them out of their wits. But he could not stir without giving away his secret. And while he hesitated, his eye absently followed a moving speck far off on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... just one little sliver—no, not as much as that—well, all right. That town, why you couldn't wake it up, Mrs. Piper, not with an earthquake. It would just fall down through the crack in the earth and go right on sleeping—no I couldn't eat another speck. We must ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... excites his organ of destructiveness. Don't you understand me? You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman's gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I hate to see water-power wasted, manure wasted, land wasted, muscle wasted, pluck ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... though she showed no flag. Instead, however, of steering for the harbour where the "Lady Alice" lay, she kept round the island to another on the other side. What she was, or why she had come to the island, I could not conjecture, I was about to return when I caught sight of a speck of white canvas above the horizon. "That probably is the 'Eagle,'" I thought. "In a few days I shall have to bid my kind friends farewell and go back to my duties ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... they can't see me 'way down here," said Helen, shaking her head. "They wouldn't notice such a speck on the lake." ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... deep of earth's plain fragrance; he looked up into the great array of heaven, and was quieted. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his careless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, the quiet of the world, as if by their silent music, sobering and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is too kind to be a schoolmaster, and Master Clive laughs at him. It was only the other day after his return from his grandmamma's that I found a picture of Mrs. Newcome and Charles, too, and of both their spectacles, quite like. He has done me and Hannah, too. Mr. Speck, the artist, says he is a wonder ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... one, at least, in Great Britain watched with anxious gaze this small speck of revolt rising so far away in the vast wilderness of the North-West; and when, about the beginning of the month of April, 1870, news came of the projected despatch of an armed force from Canada against the malcontents ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... if you had to make it. There! I knew it would be so. There isn't a speck of soda. Put on your bonnet, Matilda, and run round to Mr. Sample's and get some soda, will you?—and be quick. We shall be late, and then there ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... awed by the reverence of his manner, and I felt myself in the presence of my Maker,—a mere speck amid his vast creations. An ineffaceable impression was made on my mind, young as I was. My father died many years ago, while I was still a child, but the lesson of that hour has ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... a tiny bird, A shining speck at sleepy dawn, Forgets the ant-hill so absurd, This self-important Buffalo. Descending twenty miles away He bathes his wings at break of day— ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... examining these things, he heard a sound like that of a whirlwind, far up in the heavens. He looked up and saw a black speck which grew rapidly larger until it became a dense cloud. Out of it came a flash and then a thunderbolt. The boy was obliged to wink; and when he opened his eyes, behold! a stately man stood before him and ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... curlings of its pattern. He had numbered the very hairs on the head of George Washington, for in such minutiae did the value of the stamp reside. Did a single hair spring up above the count, it would invalidate the issue. Such values, got by circumstance or accident—resting on a flaw—founded on a speck—cause no ferment of ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Triest Where a day or two we harboured: A sunset was in the West, When, looking over the vessel's side, One of our company espied A sudden speck to larboard. And as a sea-duck flies and swims At once, so came the light craft up, 220 With its sole lateen sail that trims And turns (the water round its rims Dancing, as round a sinking cup) And by us like a fish it curled, And drew itself up close beside, Its ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... to this elusive plate, Did our Edwin curse his fate? No, he was content to live, For he was inquisitive. If he saw a speck of grit He must needs examine it, Not as any other might, Standing at his proper height, But with body slightly slanted And his head obliquely canted, While with small unblinking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
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